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Ask HN: Stripe shut our microbiology conference for adult content?

56 points by yawnxyz ↗ HN
I've heard about some crazy Stripe stories from HN, but never thought our tiny microbiology conference (go phage therapy!) would ever be in the cross-hairs, but yet here we are.

Apparently we're selling "adult content" — maybe because we use the words "early-bird" and "student" in the same sentence?

Either way, appealing doesn't seem to work. We DID use Stripe two years ago, on the same account, for the same event, with no problems.

Help???

22 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] thread
villgax
Just move on to some other gateway
yawnxyz
I tried Paypal last year and for some reason it stopped taking payments half way through the registration period. They had me work with a team of engineers and it turns out it was some gnarly bug on their end, so I spent like 30 hours debugging their bug for them. I can't go back to that.

We'll process something like < $30k so there aren't really many options for that. Invoices are too annoying to deal with for a few hundred participants.

bdcravens
Why not a dedicated events platform that takes payments like Eventbrite?
sparrish
They're right; microbiology isn't for children. <grin>
yawnxyz
Well, phage therapy is one of the tracks, so maybe they're pro-microbial resistance?
bitL
Two PhDs should be the minimal qualification to enter!
c7DJTLrn
Hopefully a Stripe engineer reads this and gives you a hotline to support. As that's what usually happens.

As for other customers who don't browse HN, they can get fucked apparently.

EDIT: aaand it happened

yawnxyz
Well tbh, I tried to go through the regular support channels and the "Was this incorrectly flagged" path, and it wouldn't allow me to post anything (since I'm just a dev on the account, not the owner).

Then I panicked, because we just went live, the event is in July and we almost didn't do this, so everything is just absolutely crazy right now. So I just went full blast on Twitter and HN lol, and I'm floored at how fast the response was.

I do wish the response was as fast as when I hit the "This is incorrectly flagged" button ;)

smca
Hey Jan, I work at Stripe—sorry for the hassle. I can see our support team has already gotten your message.

I'll make sure we get this sorted out quickly.

yawnxyz
Thank you so much!! It's also 1am here so I have to go to bed soon (Sydney time) and I'm the only dev person, but I'll try to stay up as late as I can.
smca
Sorry that it's late, we'll get this fixed ASAP. For posterity, it appears the website on your account isn't the right one and that triggered the email. It points to the adult content you mentioned that appears entirely unrelated to your business (but shares a similar URL). Might've been a typo or an expired domain that was recycled?
yawnxyz
It looks like the site was taken over by a squatter who replaced it with adult content.

This goes to show how important it is to buy domains for multiple years...

EddieEngineers
I purchased a subscription to some AI tooling yesterday that accepted either card or cashapp, is cashapp a way you could go?
zxcvbn4038
Write the stripe CEO, that will get routed to someone who can help. Front line support people are pretty useless except for the most routine functions.
waboremo
If they haven't explicitly stated why they've flagged your account, it's not worth trying to reason out yourself.

Everyone eventually gets caught in Stripe's crossfire, unfortunately they have done nothing to make it easier to get out of that rut outside of making a lot of noise on social media. So hopefully someone from Stripe reaches out to you here, if not make some noise on twitter/reddit/facebook/etc until they do.

Unfortunately the rest of us can't help here since Stripe is generally vague about why they flag accounts.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
yawnxyz
Thank you Stripe — your support is amazing.

So what happened was, the non-profit and owner of the Stripe account lost access to their organization website to a squatter, which replaced the site with adult content. So even though the event website is correct (and is microbiology related!) the parent org's site — probably used to register for the Stripe account, is not as kosher.

Stripe's support works INCREDIBLY FAST, thank you for this..

smca
Glad we could help. (Definitely falls into the "edge case" category for us here.)
yawnxyz
Hey @dang could you please edit the post to be resolved or help me delete the post? Somehow I'm unable to edit or delete at this point. Thanks!!