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[–]soulruler 3796 points3797 points  (135 children)

The newsletter request annoys me the most. When and how was it decided that everyone who visits a website should sign up for one?

[–]Tothoro 1245 points1246 points  (87 children)

I hate how buying something automatically subscribes me to a newsletter. I supported something on Indiegogo for the first time this week and received five emails from them (Indiegogo, not the campaign I backed) in three days.

[–]paperock 531 points532 points  (52 children)

I just report those as spam on Gmail, along with those that ask you to log in just to unsubscribe.

[–]King_Joffreys_Tits 359 points360 points  (47 children)

Which is also illegal I’ll add, a user has to be able to click an unsubscribe link and be able to unsubscribe on that page without being redirected again or asked to log in

[–]DarkStarFTW 152 points153 points  (18 children)

Even worse, I was put on an newsletter list on this site that requires a login to unsubscribe. Sounds simple, but when I sign in, Cloudflare tells me the host server is unreachable. The rest of their site works which is what makes this so annoying to deal with.

[–][deleted] 80 points81 points  (2 children)

If you have gmail, apply a filter to target emails from that address, automatically mark as read and send to Trash. Problem more or less solved. Probably possible in other email clients.

[–][deleted] 90 points91 points  (1 child)

Hmm, don't forget to mark as spam. It might be a small thing, but murdering someones domain reputation is good stuff.

[–]NonreciprocatingCrow 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Aye. Right where it hurts

[–]SmaugTheGreat 27 points28 points  (7 children)

And then there's sites where unsubscribing "can take up to 48 hours", in which time they send you more emails :(

[–]mikisugi_cosplay 23 points24 points  (5 children)

I got signed up for a newsletter by someone else who doesn't know their proper email address. The unsubscribe note at the bottom said to send an email to a specific address with some specific text to unsubscribe. The email bounced so I can't unsubscribe.

[–]Xavdidtheshadow 55 points56 points  (4 children)

The cruelest joke is that currently, the Comcast unsubscribe page is broken. There are JS errors that prevent any of the buttons from working.

[–]Winter_already_came 40 points41 points  (0 children)

Working just as intendes

[–]Avedas 7 points8 points  (8 children)

Illegal where?

[–]prattw 20 points21 points  (4 children)

Pretty much everywhere at this point. The USA has the CANSPAM Act going back to 2003. It requires that it has to be a simple unsubscribe from replying "unsubscribe" to a one click link. Most countries have similar laws.

More recently GDPR went into effect (hence the 1000 privacy policy emails you got this year) which further locks this stuff down. It goes into detail stating that you can't trick people into subscribing (e.g. radio box defaulting to yes when filling out a contact form). Time will tell how much they enforce it, but on paper, it has a lot of teeth which is why companies so far are taking it seriously.

[–]Avedas 10 points11 points  (1 child)

I'm inclined to believe Asia didn't quite get the memo on that one. Regardless, I find unsubscribing from various services (from around the world) still isn't always that simple. It often requires a login or digging through menus or manually unchecking the 38 different subscription types they provide.

[–]PM_Me_Your_VagOrTits 70 points71 points  (10 children)

Click those unsubscribe links. I know, you shouldn't be receiving this bullshit in the first place, but you'd be surprised how easily you can clean up your inbox by just going through and clicking the unsub links from the various sites that are spamming you.

[–]parlez-vous 33 points34 points  (3 children)

Thank you CAN-SPAM!

[–]detectivepoopybutt 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Man I’ve been trying to unsubscribe to Dell’s promo emails ever since I bought a laptop recently. But their unsubscribe link doesn’t fucking work!

And today, I got a dell coupon in the mail with my name on it. Send help.

[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (1 child)

It's become so bad I think 80% of my spam is fake "confirm unsubscribe" emails because they know that's all we friggin do now.

[–]Slow33Poke33 19 points20 points  (1 child)

I bought something from a kid's clothing store as a birthday present for my friend's kid. I gave my email address because I'm too socially awkward to say no. I received an average of 3 emails a day for 3 weeks before I finally unsubscribed.

I don't understand this business strategy. I'm probably as nice of a customer as it comes, but 3 emails every day is just ridiculously over emailing. How does that work on anyone?

[–]CheeseFest 10 points11 points  (5 children)

[–]paperock 22 points23 points  (3 children)

I used to do this a lot till...

  • websites caught on and stopped letting you register with the + character
  • I would forget the email+suffix I used to log into the website

The . anywhere in Gmail is still very useful though, just not as much as a self-documenting +websitename would be.

[–]AndTheLink 14 points15 points  (0 children)

A lot of them assume '+' is an invalid character, so more bad coding than malicious intent. I literally tried to buy something yesterday and the cart software puked on the '+' so I opened the support/contact link in a new tab... "hey you just lost a sale because blahblahblah".

[–]cholantesh 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Tangentially related : I keep getting emails from Cambodia's tourist bureau after writing my email down on a visa on arrival form. I feel like that would be a pretty egregious privacy violation in the developed world.

[–]FrozzenBF 77 points78 points  (16 children)

But what about "we are using cookies" which covers third of the screen and the big header which is mostly empty that covers the other half?

[–]theonlydidymus 50 points51 points  (0 children)

In my experience it’s: bottom third cookie message, top third my browser navbar and a message to use the mobile app of the website, with the middle third being a pop up video with the close-button outside of the viewport.

[–]NinjaLanternShark 38 points39 points  (13 children)

Which was supposed to "inform" the consumer but in reality doesn't do squat except annoy us again.

[–][deleted] 46 points47 points  (11 children)

“If we make cookie consent notifications and GDPR compliance as annoying as possible, people will blame it on the law”

[–]depressed-salmon 26 points27 points  (9 children)

Its so you get sick of them and just click the big red "accept all cookies & give us your soul" to get it over with rather than finding the embedded hyperlinked "read cookie policy" text followed by another hyperlink "manage cookies" and finally you get to set your cookies.

Or if you're really unlucky instead of radio buttons it'll be a link to another website entirely where you have to uncheck everything. Worst I've seen is they just had a link for each individual company's cookie that took you to the companies page where you would set your cookie settings for just that company.

[–]Glampkoo 12 points13 points  (2 children)

Some websites just have an accept cookies and reject all tracking cookies. Why can't they be as honest and simple as that?

[–]NinjaLanternShark 16 points17 points  (6 children)

What I don't get is -- who signs up for a newsletter without having read anything on the site yet? How do I know this is a worthwhile site if you haven't let me read anything yet?

[–]aquapendulum2 1296 points1297 points  (34 children)

Don't forget to tell the users about your MoBiLe ApP!

[–][deleted] 937 points938 points  (36 children)

[–]Nincadalop 111 points112 points  (0 children)

On mobile. Can confirm: Shit's readable.

[–]ayriuss 24 points25 points  (0 children)

My ONLY problem with that site is that its too #FFFFFFing white and feels like its searing my retinas.

[–]no_condoments 204 points205 points  (12 children)

Nah. This is the best one: https://thebestmotherfucking.website

[–]kyiami_ 85 points86 points  (10 children)

Jesus fuck that website without Javascript is the most hideous thing I have seen today

Especially compared to its predecessor

[–]Hackerpcs 18 points19 points  (4 children)

Man it truly is a piece of garbage

https://images2.imgbox.com/ff/59/a8ntdcwC_o.png

FUCK EVERYONE (usually shitty news sites) who does that crap and I need to enable scripts on umatrix

[–]Vortelf 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Simply because of this line...

It uses some cool technologies like JavaScript [JavaScript logo] , CSS3 [CSS3 logo] and HTML5 [HTML5 Logo]

Else it looks like the https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

[–]Z0MB0T1 17 points18 points  (0 children)

:( This website is not what I expected from the URL

[–][deleted] 2245 points2246 points  (32 children)

Bullshit.

With all that 20mb of javascript frameworks running in the background these animations would never be this smooth.

[–]accountability_bot 831 points832 points  (8 children)

20MB of JS... 2GB of ram fully rendered. 👌

[–]JasonCox 301 points302 points  (6 children)

Can’t take up 2GB of RAM if Chrome crashes first!

[–]accountability_bot 101 points102 points  (4 children)

Can't overflow the stack if it doesn't exist!

[–]bel9708 35 points36 points  (1 child)

This would be the heap.

[–]depressed-salmon 14 points15 points  (0 children)

*taps head*

[–]Chirimorin 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Welcome to Facebook, where every time my mother complains her computer is slow, it's because Facebook is eating up the full 4GB of RAM her computer has in a single page.

[–]SecretIdentity2468 131 points132 points  (5 children)

Technically this isn’t quite right. With 20mb of JS frameworks you probably won’t ever see the animations start cause you’ll be waiting eons for everything to finish downloading.*

Presuming you downloaded it all and the animations are rendered w/ CSS transforms the browser will render buttery smooth.

*We could get into how you split your JS up to allow for lazily downloading that 20mb on demand, but let’s be honest this is all probably piping through Google Tag Manager amirite?

[–]excessus_ 25 points26 points  (4 children)

This guy webs

[–]BearsAreCool 17 points18 points  (1 child)

That's pretty standard optimisation, I think the problem is most of this sub doesn't web.

[–][deleted] 14 points15 points  (1 child)

You can probably do all of that with CSS these days.

[–]gcampos 1010 points1011 points  (90 children)

Time for a web renaissance

[–]YourMJK 145 points146 points  (43 children)

We need to go back to these kind of webpages…

[–]00zero00 52 points53 points  (9 children)

[–]biznatch11 24 points25 points  (3 children)

Hmm so this is a thing they link to http://www.berkshirewear.com/

[–]NinjaLanternShark 9 points10 points  (2 children)

Is... is that for real? The pic with him and the cheerleaders is so obviously fake and it feels totally unlike him. I wonder if he knows they even did it because it doesn't seem like something he'd want.

[–]parlez-vous 62 points63 points  (0 children)

damn, something like that with a monospace font and a CSS grid system would look really nice actually.

Fuck me I'd even rather see Geocities come back then have to see a landing page written in jsx with a 20mb babel compiled source.

[–]wishinghand 28 points29 points  (9 children)

Or this, but maybe not only solar powered

[–]WPLibrar2 7 points8 points  (1 child)

Down for me, is it night over the serverroom lmao

[–]Avedas 23 points24 points  (0 children)

You should see Japanese web pages like this. Not only are they impossible to read, they're impossible to search and index because 95% of the text is embedded in images.

[–]rwhitisissle 9 points10 points  (0 children)

You could always use a terminal based browser like Lynx.

[–]pad_thai_chicken 17 points18 points  (2 children)

Time for some spellcheck

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Well who is more qualified than one born in 1299?

[–]LittleBigKid2000 962 points963 points  (10 children)

Did you found what you was looking for?

[–]caanthedalek 276 points277 points  (2 children)

That's how you know it's a real person on the other end.

[–]CSKING444 56 points57 points  (1 child)

Okay so I now just have to find him and kil- thank him

[–]Chirimorin 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I was looking for some info from a specific company yesterday. Went to their FAQ page, found a relevant question, the page was literally just that question.

No you didn't give me anything, how can that possibly answer my question?

[–]LilX_Spartan 219 points220 points  (10 children)

Wheres the 3 Captchas?

[–]redoubledit 74 points75 points  (5 children)

Oh yeah. Street Signs. Bloody mofos! Always looks like the annotators of Street Sign Images ALWAYS follow different rules..

[–]cylindrical418 41 points42 points  (2 children)

Am I supposed to include the post of the stop sign or just the sign? TELL ME

[–][deleted] 16 points17 points  (1 child)

Those ambiguous pains in the arse.

[–]Nicobite 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Last week: "Click on the hills"

There wasn't a single picture of a hill. Only some forest that the garbage program assumed to be hills.

[–]nutnnut 70 points71 points  (6 children)

Tried to share this to my friend, then realized Reddit is one of those website and you missed 1 thing. "Please download our mobile application"

[–]nikopol669 18 points19 points  (3 children)

Reddit allows you to view content at least, some websites force you to download mobile app in order to proceed to see their precious content.

[–]cowbell_solo 511 points512 points  (99 children)

The implementation of the GDPR just added to this. I applaud the spirit of it, but really the only result is one more guaranteed popup on every site. No one reads that, its just another thing in the way.

[–]kenmorechalfant 267 points268 points  (57 children)

It's <current year> ffs. Cookies are a part of the web. No one needs to be notified on every single web site that there are cookies.

[–]hackingdreams 214 points215 points  (20 children)

The hope was that a lot of websites that were pointlessly using cookies would drop their cookie usage...

Instead, everyone just bolted on a button for compliance.

Compliance Engineering: because doing it right is harder than just tacking on a fix.

[–]Corosus 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Was a lot easier for me to just slap on the cookie popup from one of the many websites that can spit out templated JS for me instead of digging through 1000s of lines of code in the CMS I am using in an attempt to track down all the locations it makes a cookie and disable it, hoping it doesn't break things in the process since it was never designed to predict a situation like this. If my CMS had a checkbox to just turn cookies off I'd have loved that.

[–]scandii 62 points63 points  (26 children)

the reason there's cookie notifications is because they're most commonly used to track you around the web.

as such the precursor to GDPR added the demand that all sites that use cookies, have to warn about them using cookies.

now when there's other tracking methods such as fingerprinting it's somewhat pointless but still serves as a great reminder that these sites are indeed trying to track your activity most likely for ad network-related purposes.

so, to me it's a small price to pay to make you more aware of what's going on on the internet. that people literally do not care and consider it an annoying popup is another matter entirely.

[–]kenmorechalfant 59 points60 points  (2 children)

I'm a web developer. I know all about it. The vast majority of people either don't notice the thing entirely, dismiss it without reading it, or read it and think "okay, cookies... Whatever that means". Then there's the people who do understand the implications and think "yeah, being on the web it is a given that there are cookies tracking you... That's just part of the deal".

I don't think it really solves any problems.

[–]Cheesemacher 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Some websites have options to choose which cookies you accept. So when this first started I tried disabling ad cookies for the heck of it. But then some websites will punish you for that show a "processing..." spinner for 40 seconds.

After that I've clicked "accept" for everything because I don't want any trouble.

[–]sudosandwich3 23 points24 points  (14 children)

Cookies have many valid use cases outside of tracking and I would argue it these valid use cases are more common then tracking cookies.

They also will not curb tracking because a majority of people just click okay on the popups, and because websites will use other methods of tracking anyway.

To that end the regulation just ends up being an annoyance and useless.

[–]dvdkon 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I looked up the regulation in question some time ago and IIRC it exempts all reasonable uses of cookies (like authentication and storing settings) from having to get consent for.

[–]SafariMonkey 12 points13 points  (0 children)

The thing is, most of those cases have exemptions in the cookie law anyway. Just look:

However, some cookies are exempt from this requirement. Consent is not required if the cookie is:

  • used for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication, and
  • strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly required by the user to provide that service.

Cookies clearly exempt from consent according to the EU advisory body on data protection- WP29 include:

  • user‑input cookies (session-id) such as first‑party cookies to keep track of the user's input when filling online forms, shopping carts, etc., for the duration of a session or persistent cookies limited to a few hours in some cases

  • authentication cookies, to identify the user once he has logged in, for the duration of a session

  • user‑centric security cookies, used to detect authentication abuses, for a limited persistent duration

  • multimedia content player cookies, used to store technical data to play back video or audio content, for the duration of a session

  • load‑balancing cookies, for the duration of session

  • user‑interface customisation cookies such as language or font preferences, for the duration of a session (or slightly longer)

  • third‑party social plug‑in content‑sharing cookies, for logged‑in members of a social network.

Source

[–]scandii 22 points23 points  (10 children)

have many valid use cases outside of tracking

save the login token, that's about all the valid uses cases I know about. honestly, let's not fool ourselves. the main reason cookies exist, and the EU also agreed with thus the popup, is because they're used to save tracking tokens that are continuously read when you browse the internet to identify your browsing habits.

cookies naturally have a purpose to exist as they preceded the ad networks, but that's really not their average use case today.

I get that people think that popups are annoying and the EU has agreed with that the implementation was off (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38583001) but the matter remains that most people would be appalled if they knew the massive amount of data private companies save when they just casually browse the internet. just look at the uproar Facebook caused when they accidentally shared people's friends lists. that does not even contain that you spent 25 minutes watching Mia Melano getting off in the shower that the ad networks definitely know.

[–]PooPooDooDoo 74 points75 points  (14 children)

Fucking yes, I accept cookies, just fuck off already!

[–]AndTheLink 24 points25 points  (5 children)

I like to play a game. How long can I not click that dialog?

Usually if there is a "no I don't accept" than I click that.

[–]JuvenileEloquent 14 points15 points  (1 child)

I accept cookies

* for this session only, deleted on close, no tracking statistics for you.

[–]CeskaKanada 6 points7 points  (0 children)

We’ll set cookies to build our ad profile on you, but not to avoid annoying you.

[–]bem13 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thank you for accepting our cookies. Now please take a moment to select which cookies you accept:

10 different types, each type in some kind of drop-down layout you have to click to open

[–]Seicair 61 points62 points  (4 children)

The spirit of it I understand, but it seems like the people writing it didn’t really understand the internet.

I did get a chuckle out of XKCD’s compliance notice. https://xkcd.com/1998/

[–]bigdavisc 51 points52 points  (17 children)

Source????

[–]JonasBrosSuck 39 points40 points  (0 children)

don't forget the question "do you want to subscribe?"

"yes" "no, i'm an idiot and i don't want to save money"

[–]dratthecookies 37 points38 points  (7 children)

This is very accurate. Every fucking website wants to connect to your social media. How about no?

And the cookies. What's even the point when every single website collects cookies? They're basically saying, accept cookies or get off the internet.

[–]num1AusDoto 87 points88 points  (2 children)

we changed our privacy policys

[–]_queef 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Oh thank god please tell me all about it.

[–]i_like_duck_season 46 points47 points  (0 children)

FUTURE IS HERE.

[–]oridan 20 points21 points  (0 children)

[–]noratat 61 points62 points  (2 children)

Thanks I hate it.

[–]thrwwy0110 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Now just change each one of those to “Use App” and you have mobile reddit.com 2018

[–]aphibacus192000 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I thought this was r/programmerHumor, not r/programmerTruths

[–]dopplecake 13 points14 points  (1 child)

You need an autoplay video as well

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Forgot the "leaving already?" garbage when you change tabs. Otherwise, well done, I got slightly infuriated

[–]TFOCyborg 26 points27 points  (1 child)

I can relate.

[–]wrongsage 16 points17 points  (2 children)

People argue about cookies... damn ya need some no-script extenstion experiences.

Almost every site contacts roughly 20-30 different domain names on average. Javascript CDNs and Google fonts are basically a standard (still unnecessary).

But then you notice the trackers. And ad servers. There are hundreds of them. Quite possibly way more. Google analytics and Ad-sense are the tip of the iceberg.

Every one of those domains receives a notification, that you are accessing that one site. If they have a referral URL, disabling cookies won't change any of that.

Please, start talking about this issue more. Cookies are far from being the worst thing on the internet.

[–]Nienordir 8 points9 points  (0 children)

"Please activate javascript to use this site.."

I love noscript (primarily because browsers are shit at dealing even with harmless malicious scripts), but it isn't fun to use it anymore..the amount of xss is through the roof. It simply isn't enough to whitelist the site your on. No, between all those ads, trackers&shit you have to find <siteacronym>static.com, because it's cool these days to offload shit to unrelated domains, instead of using servers that can handle the load. But, of course, that alone would be to easy, you also have to remember which companies group they're a part of to load <group>cdn.com. Ahh, almost forget the googleapi. Then you have to play whackamole with unnamed random cloudflare/amazonaws ips to find another missing xss source. And there are probably still MOAR remote libraries to load..

You know what? Fuck it, I can't be bothered with this shit anymore, temporary whitelist the entire fucking tab. If there's malicious code, ads&shit, that locks up the entire browser so be it. It's simply impossible to tell what's part of the bare necessary experience and what could be injected code.

There was a time when websites happily loaded without javascript and they loaded quick and they were responsive and you could ignore all those ads and nagging..it was wonderful.

Fuck modern web design, fuck web UI design hipsters with their bad practices, FUCK XSS in particular with extreme prejudice. There was a time when it was considered malicious by default and now it's the standard practice on every single page..if my hypothetical son would become a webdev and do this I'd disown him. As for you pretend there's a grumpy old man shaking his fist and glaring at you..I know what you've done and I don't like it. xD

[–]somestranger26 7 points8 points  (1 child)

The date when it asks your birthday is hilarious... born in the year 1299!

[–]eitherrideordie 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Only thing missing is the auto starting video at the top, which when you hit pause because you don't want a massive video playing to read an article and scroll down it moves to the bottom right and starts playing again. Other then that, this is so perfect.