How to document what happened to you, so it counts
If a company has done something to you and you want it to matter, the single most useful thing you can do is make your account checkable.
Not moderate. Not polite. Not forgiving. Checkable — meaning a stranger with no reason to believe you can verify the specific claims and find them to be true. That is the property that survives being disputed, and it is the one thing that anger, however earned, cannot substitute for.
This applies whether you are posting here, filing a regulatory complaint, talking to a journalist, or arguing in a support ticket.
The shape that works
1. What happened, in one sentence, with a date.
On 4 August 2026, my hosting account was suspended, which took my mail server offline for every domain I own.
Not "they destroyed my business with no warning". The second sentence may be truer. The first one can be checked.
2. The sequence, as a timeline. Dates and times with a timezone, one line each, in order. Include the boring entries — the automated acknowledgement, the ticket that was closed without a reply. The gaps in a timeline are frequently the story.
3. The numbers, measured rather than remembered. How many domains. How many hours. How much money, and whether that figure is charged, held, or lost. If you are estimating, say you are estimating. A number you have marked as an estimate is credible; a precise number that turns out to be invented takes everything else down with it.
4. What you tried. Every channel, and what came back. This is what separates "the support was terrible" from something anyone can act on.
5. What you want. Reinstatement, a refund, an explanation, or simply for it to be on the record. Say which. A complaint with no stated remedy gets filed under sympathy.
Redact, but redact honestly
Take out account numbers, addresses, card digits, the names of individual junior staff, and anything that identifies other customers. Leave in the case reference, the dates, the policy citations, and the company's own words.
Two rules that matter more than they look:
- Redact by covering, never by cropping. A crop removes the context that proves the screenshot is real — the URL, the clock, the surrounding interface. Black boxes over the sensitive parts keep the frame intact. (The submission form on this site burns redaction into the pixels, so what leaves your browser is already redacted. Do not trust a tool that only draws a box on top.)
- Never redact something that changes the meaning. If a sentence only reads badly with a clause removed, the removal is the dishonesty, not the clause.
Say the parts that do not help you
This is counter-intuitive and it is the most powerful single technique here.
If you were late on a payment, say so. If the policy you broke is one you actually broke, say so, and then make the argument you are really making — that the response was disproportionate, or unappealable, or that you were told about it in a channel they had just cut off.
An account that includes the inconvenient facts is far harder to dismiss than one that omits them, because the standard rebuttal is to surface the omission and let it discredit everything else. Get there first and there is nothing to surface.
You are not being fair for their benefit. You are being fair because it makes you unanswerable.
Keep the evidence somewhere they cannot reach
The recurring pattern in almost every story on these sites: the evidence lived inside the account that got switched off.
- Export your records before you need them, and keep the copy somewhere the company does not host.
- Save notices as files, not as email in a mailbox that depends on the same provider.
- Screenshot with the URL bar and a visible clock in frame.
- Keep the original files. A compressed re-upload of a re-screenshot of a forward is worth very little.
Why this site asks for it this way
The point of this project is freedom of speech, and specifically the speech of people who got run over by something far bigger than them and were told, in effect, to be quiet and reapply.
A site full of unverifiable anger is easy to dismiss, and dismissing it is exactly what happens. A site full of dated, specific, checkable accounts — with the inconvenient details left in — is not dismissable, because every attempt to dismiss it can be answered with the record.
Your story does not need to be dramatic to matter. It needs to be true and it needs to be checkable. Write it down while you still can.