I have passed this on to our marketing team. Sorry you are having difficulty unsubscribing. In the meantime, feel free to email me (jgc@) from the email that needs to be removed and I will make sure it happens.
You're lucky this person cares. If there's not an easy unsubscribe I just report it as spam, and hope enough other people do the same that the firm becomes untrusted.
Pitting a corp against Google's customer support is a nice revenge.
It takes way too many clicks to report spam in GMail. Considering this is such a frequent operation, it should have a one-button "ban" function, possibly with an "Oops" undo if you pressed it by mistake. I have received quite a bit of Cloudflare spam on my (GMail) work address and immediately added it to my ban list. I also have a long memory and am highly unlikely to use services from companies that rely on spam for marketing.
For my personal email I run my own mail server, create a unique address for each vendor and ban the address if it is abused.
> I run my own mail server, create a unique address for each vendor and ban the address if it is abused
I do the same and it's immensely useful!
I find it's also a great indicator of how well that vendor protects my info... if there's a sudden surge of spam to an address only that vendor knows, there's a chance they leaked/sold my info and I know it's time to change passwords and/or reassess my relationship with the vendor.
Yes. I knew all I needed to know about Dell's infosec when I started receiving pornographic spam addressed to dell@majid.fm (my old vanity domain, no longer in use).
> It takes way too many clicks to report spam in GMail. Considering this is such a frequent operation, it should have a one-button "ban" function, possibly with an "Oops" undo if you pressed it by mistake.
If keyboard shortcuts are enabled, '!' is mapped to "Report as spam". I don't recall whether the status popover that appears at the bottom of the UI has an "Undo" link, though...
I should have been more precise. I meant the process of banning an email address so it can never again spam me. Doesn't work for the worst offenders who forge random source addresses, but usually does for slimy marketing departments.
You have to:
1. click on the email from the inbox
2. click on the three-dot hamburger menu on the far right of the sender line
3. click on the 'Block "Evil Sender"' entry in the popup menu
4. confirm that you do in fact want to stop receiving spam from the spammer by clicking the "Block" button
5. Click the "Move to spam" button in the dialog box that appears
Same here. I do try to unsubscribe. I'm fine with up to 1.5 'pain points' during unsubscribing. That usually means I hit the limit after exactly 1 thing below as long as it's not taken to a point of ridiculousness:
- Logging in
- Clicking between multiple confusing tickboxes of which emails I want to unsubscribe from. Hint: If someone is actually going to the trouble to hit "unsubscribe", the answer is simply all of the bullshit non-critical emails.
- "You've been unsubscribed from Saturday morning emails sent by this particular product manager" ... implying I have to go find where to unsubscribe from all the rest of the damn emails.
But after that, or if any of these things are too onerous, I hit "spam" with a vengeance on. every. single. email. I get from that company ever again.
That said, I actually never got any Cloudflare spam at all, which is impressive.
Not everybody is using Google/Gmail/Microsoft :(
I would like to point out that this attitude (do not take it personal please) helps Google became the world wide communication arbitrer.
Do we want that?
Please try not to use weasel phrases like "Sorry you are having difficulty..." The poster clearly articulated the very real technical problems they are having with your broken unsubscribe process, doing your debugging work for you, and the phrasing of your response implies that the fault lies with the user. I don't think this was intentional weasel-speak on your part, but do please try to be aware of your audience.
Is "sorry you are having difficulty" a "weasel phrase"?
"Weasel phrases" are non-apologies. A simple non-apology is something like, "I'm sorry you are feeling that way". Let's say Bob wrecks Alice's car after coming back from the bar last night. When Alice wakes up, she notices the car is wrecked and she will be unable to take a client out for lunch in it. Alice becomes angry at Bob as a result and indicates he is responsible for wrecking the car and not telling her the night before, so she could get another car to drive. Alice would want a resolution, either in the moment (Bob giving Alice another car) or an assurance that it won't happen again (a real apology accepting responsibility). An "I'm sorry you are feeling this way" from Bob becomes the non-acknowledgment of the actual cause of the emotional output from Alice. Instead, it deflects back to Alice for resolve. This is tedious, at best.
A good tip for Bob avoiding these "you statements"[1] is to leave out "you" as the object of his stated emotional output. Instead, Bob could say "I hear you are feeling sad and angry because I had a wreck and came home last night and went straight to bed without telling you". This comment from Bob becomes a non-you statement by splitting on the "because" and the "without". There exists a separate acknowledgement of the emotional output from Alice, "I hear you are feeling sad and angry" and an acceptance of the action and result, "I wrecked your car and didn't tell you about it."
It is my opinion you get a lot of these types of comments in public forums, where the conversation is a matter of public record. When given the choice between leaving a public trace of "We were the cause of your difficulty...we'll fix you up though." vs. "We hear you are having issues...", I do think companies will tend to do the later, waiting to give the more specific comment to the recipient outside the public view. Maybe our tendency to think we need these comments aired in public is some sort of error in our reassignment of another's emotions. Their emotional output isn't ours, but we may have empathy for it.
As others have mentioned, the comment comes from someone who seems to care about these things, so if Alice trusts Bob, she'll let the comment slide knowing he'll come through for her in the future.
"Having difficulty" means it's still possible, just difficult and - dark patterns aside - the OP could still succeed if they knew the right steps. Given what OP said though, that's not the case here, so yeah, that phrasing is deflecting responsibility. Definite weasel wording.
How is "Sorry you are having difficulty" a "weasel phrase"? I don't see how that implies the user is at fault. It seems like you're policing language unnecessarily
I've seen you post here on HN a few times and I think you're genuine here.
However I also think the previous commenter has a point - "we're sorry you're having trouble and we're looking into it" or words to those effect are things anyone who reports issues to big companies hears over and over again and it usually means "we don't give a damn about you and we're not gonna do anything. Suck it, puny human".
For anyone who doesn't recognize you except as a random person who popped up speaking for CloudFlare, it probably seems reasonable to interpret your words as corporate weasel speak, especially on a post accusing your company of potentially illegal behavior. Even if you didn't mean it that way and this does turn out to be an honest and temporary mistake.
For those who want to reduce corporate weasel speak:
Do not criticize those who USE it. It is a symptom of a larger problem.
Rather, criticize people (like many in this thread) who say "you should sue" in response to any problem you have with a corporation. That litigiousness is what makes corporate weasel speak necessary. If the result of acting like a human and saying "oh, my bad" is to get sued (and have a slam dunk case, because they admitted to it!), then people are going to stop saying "my bad" and start saying "that sucks".
This is a cultural choice that we make in the US, and the choice is made in places like this thread. If you want to change it, start here and shame those who say "sue!" after a person encounters a bug trying to unsubscribe.
Or we can all continue to assume that everything is malicious, everyone is in on it, and there are no good people. And we'll continue to get a lot of corporate weasel speak. And we'll deserve it.
I don't think you can really know that. It's the sort of thing that would be very easy to slip through testing (or that a lower-level employee could slip through unapproved), and lots of companies don't pay as much attention to the technical side of their marketing operations as they do their main product tech.
> Because it's trying to avoid accepting any responsibility
I would argue the opposite. If you are not taking responsibility then you shouldn't use the word "Sorry" as it actually implies that it was your fault. You ought to use "I regret" in those cases - there's a blog post on this floating around somewhere.
He's not saying that the cause of the difficulty is on the user, simply pointing out that the user is facing a difficult situation (caused by CloudFlare in this case)
Well, at least you are relatable in ways that Cloudflare generally cannot be. Your recent post on the Minitel conversion is just one example [0].
There is one key thing to keep in mind for those advancing uncharitable critiques of JGC and Cloudflare. It is entirely plausible that JGC is well-intentioned. Yet, Cloudflare has had to hire quite a few people recently.
There may not necessarily be a culture fit. Some new marketing hires may have thought that this dark pattern was fair game. And JGC can strongly disagree without really being aware of this dark pattern. Those two things can hold at the same time.
*punts fourth wall* Forum's gonna forum and memefy everything it can (then there's the entirely cognitively-dissonant way this mindset looks up to things...). I think the only solution is to be hyper-aware of the unintuitive impact (and toll) it can legitimately have... but that can be difficult when distracted by idk being Senior Juggler Of Cat Herders or whatever. shrug internet be weird but probably harmless
I find this kind of funny in a sad way. What does the marketting team have to do with this? This should go directly to the law people in the company and to the engineering team, who fixes it as quickly as possible. Does the law need to be validated first by the marketting team at cloudflare? If they have had any say in how this process works, then they f'ed it up already, breaking the law! Basically being Internet criminals. Might even be intentional to drive their number games.
Not sure how it is at your company, but at most companies marketing email is almost entirely handled by...marketing. Their email service provider should have provided review and guidance on the preferences page.
This is not about the e-mail itself, but the pages, which are supposed to let you unsubscribe and their way of functioning. Of course it would be best to have a single click link in the e-mail, but even that would require some kind of API in the system. I doubt the marketing department has people working on those systems.
Those are usually handled by the email service provider. Email deliverability is a speciality in itself, something even a company as tech-savvy as Cloudflare probably doesn't have the skills in-house.
Properly handling opt-outs is part of it. MailChimp does the right thing by soliciting feedback, including the option "I never signed up for these emails", hopefully that goes into whatever scoring mechanism they use to kick out abusive customers. Sadly the current state of what passes for front-end development is abysmal, with pages often not working if a user has cookies or javascript disabled, or an ad-blocker.
As for JGC, he deserves credit for doing the right thing, but that does not change the fact his company violated the law, and their marketing department richly deserves any fire and brimstone is raining down their necks right now. I would say most companies should probably have their email service provider contracts controlled by legal rather than marketing, most marketing departments have an inherent conflict of interest in this regard.
I'm going to point out that it's only because this is HN and someone here is much more likely to be able to cause PR problems than the average customer. Awesome companies don't harangue people who are already paying them and then make it harder than clicking "unsubscribe" to put a stop to it. I don't think anybody at Cloudflare is terrified that somebody's scorned mistress could wreak her revenge by punching their e-mail into an insecure Unsubscribe box and thus delaying their knowledge of having access to a new beta.
Yeah but you don't ever really see Google or Amazon or Facebook or Netflix or Spotify on here, except employees commenting unofficially. Cloudflare is on here quite frequently and meaningfully. I'd rather companies communicate, even if (and especially when) they fuck up.
It helps that cloudflare isn't too big to fail yet and still trying to get better.
I know a lot of companies where you can unsubscribe from the mailing lists easily, so their CTO doesn't have to do the PR damage control when they hit a social media front-page. Those companies are way ahead of those with CTO having a google alert setup.
Indeed. He has previously mentioned that he set up an alerting system to notify him when Cloudflare is mentioned on HN, as well. So it's a mix of both.
His response here was perfectly adequate and beyond what the CTO of almost any other large tech company would ever do. Not that it deserves unbridled praise and admiration or something, but the immediate attacks and "weasel word" accusations from others are really weird. HN is way too cynical, sometimes.
This is awesome. So, smart companies have monitoring for their brand keywords across key websites/web and jump in to respond the nip the bud before things go bad.
I had read somewhere that Gitlab does the same. They have a "How to respond discussions on Hackernews." or something in that line.
This is often true, but [un]fortunately in this case you're letting everyone know you don't really have any idea what you're talking about. JGC is active in non-CloudFlare discussions on HN all the time, and is the CTO. He'd probably be in this thread regardless of his role.
Only for the easy or tech things though. I was curious if I'll trigger some response about CloudFlare enabling targeted abuse online, but that topic seems untouchable to people doing monitoring.
OP does not seem to be "having difficulty". That sounds a bit passive-aggressive, like if OP was a grandma having difficulties with her computer due to age. OP jumped through a lot of hoops and done a solid investigation without much issues. It is clear that it is the system that is having difficulty, or just not doing what it's supposed to do.
(The "sorry" further makes it sound more like talking down. Have you noticed how in a hierarchy the bosses are the ones usually saying "thank you" and "sorry"?)
The correct phrasing is "it is clear to me our system is broken [for you], let me …".
Edited to address the "sorry", it is easy to slip it in without thinking. I'm sure CF rep here did not use that phrasing intentionally either.
There is no excuse whatsoever for requiring someone clicking a link in an email you sent them, to verify their address with you (by clicking a link you sent them.) OP is right, you're engaged in dark pattern techniques and you know damn well that you're doing it.
OP: don't give him a pass. Sue him under the CAN-SPAM act.
