HRD Software has been in the news (literally) and blog posts recently and I wanted to communicate with you all directly to let you know what has transpired.

Given that I'm not involved in the day-to-day running of HRD, I end up getting involved on more of an exception basis.  But here's what happened:

An HRD customer called tech support with a technical problem.  After some period of time where the HRD support tech could not resolve the problem, the customer posted negative reviews about HRD on QRZ and eham.

Subsequent to that, our support tech told the customer (in writing) that they have been "blacklisted" in our software license server until the customer removes the negative post.  So the customer took this written communications and posted the details of this on QRZ and eham.  This has led to several days of really bad press and other problems.

In some locations, there may actually be laws that prevent a company from retaliating against a customer for posting negative reviews.

Some customers were able to pull the list of "blacklisted" customers off our license server.  There were about 35 of over 20,000 registered users on that list.

Here's what's important to understand... and if there's an underlying story that's not getting told, it's this:

When one of our developers created the license server, for whatever reason, they used the term "blacklist" in the database to describe cases where a license key (tied to a callsign) was deactivated.  Actually, "deactivated" would have been a more accurate word to use.

Here's why...

Rarely, we've had folks who ask for... and are given... a refund.  After being given the refund, the key is deactivated... or in the database, the key is "blacklisted."  It's an awful term to use to describe a license key deactivation.  We've changed that language.

But here's the point...

Just because there are 35 calls/licenses tagged as "blacklisted" (aka. "deactivated"), it's no reason to assume that they've all been victims of retaliation.  Most of them likely posted a negative review AFTER they received a refund and the key was deactivated.

I've stepped in and personally dealt with the employee and policy issues related to this event.  It's not going to happen again.

So there's a blow-up about this right now and this is what's behind it.  I wanted you all to get the straight story from me.

Mike, WA9PIE