[HN Gopher] I don't want to fill out your contact form
___________________________________________________________________
I don't want to fill out your contact form
Author : domdomegg
Score : 216 points
Date : 2024-05-04 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (adamjones.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (adamjones.me)
| dazc wrote:
| On the other side, a typical contact form message reads something
| like... 'Of course I have read the FAQs but just wanted to ask
| the exact same question which happens to be the very first FAQ on
| the list...
|
| Also, publishing an email address seldom works out well.
| hnbad wrote:
| Sure but that message would be no worse if sent by email
| instead of contact form.
|
| And he does address the "risk" of publishing an email address.
| I can second that I've seen more spam from WordPress forms than
| published email addresses.
| notatoad wrote:
| And I don't want to read your email...
| delish wrote:
| >I don't want to fill out your contact form
|
| Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be _contacted_
| by you. It's a cost to them. The median "contact us for a sales
| quote" form is clearer and has less friction than the median
| "file a complaint / ask a question" form.
|
| One reason not in the article people might use forms instead of
| email is the "set and setting" of being a guest on a website and
| filling out their form. When in "your" email inbox as opposed to
| on "someone else's" site, you may conduct yourself differently.
|
| An example of this is the sometimes-onerous Github issue template
| questions. I'm not arguing they're not necessary, but they do two
| things: mandate required information and _imply_ that you are a
| guest and you must hold yourself to someone else's communication
| norms.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Yes -- and companies or governments don't want to be
| _contacted_ by you.
|
| For a company to make a sale, there needs to be a way for the
| client to contact them, a way to make a purchase. Having crap
| contact forms makes as much sense as having restaurant waiters
| spit clients in the face to greet them. With the world we're
| living in that might become the norm in a few years or months.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've worked for client who spend a lot of money optimizing
| form fill-out rates down to the nth degree.
|
| I once worked on a mortgage form. It had a pic of a call
| center person next to it. I persuaded my boss to try a pic of
| a dog with a tie, glasses and headset I found instead. It
| increased the conversion rate by 17%.
|
| People are weird.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but they do two things: mandate required information and
| _imply_ that you are a guest and you must hold yourself to
| someone else's communication norms.
|
| To be honest, tools like this do quite a good job of filtering
| out people who want you to bend over backward for them. If
| someone is so stubborn that they refuse to take a couple
| minutes to fill out someone's form, they're likely to be very
| demanding and uncooperative with every future engagement.
|
| Of course, these people never see themselves as such.
| amluto wrote:
| > Hook up a shared mailbox, collaborative inbox, or one of the
| many off-the-shelf customer service solutions like Zendesk, Zoho
| Desk, Freshdesk, Zammad, osTicket, or FreeScout to your email.
|
| This list is missing the classic, and still excellent, Request
| Tracker.
|
| https://bestpractical.com/request-tracker
|
| https://github.com/bestpractical/rt
|
| (I have no affiliation, and I've only ever interacted with it
| from the request-submitting side. But it's always been
| straightforward and rock-solid, and it's worth something that the
| _same system_ has worked continuously for apparently 20 years.
| And it's flexible enough that I once worked with a small
| institution that wired up Request Tracker for submitting jobs to
| a large-format printer.)
| dijit wrote:
| I used it at one company, that company switched to Jira.
|
| I miss RT, it was ugly but good.
| domdomegg wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, will add!
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| It's funny how easy it is for something to just keep working
| when they aren't badly combining it with other services they
| purchased (hi ZenDesk, I still can't delete users in it because
| that's part of "Support" which we don't use, but I can create
| users just fine because that's still part of "Chat").
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Last time I worked with RT, to do anything custom you had to
| script it in perl. That's a language that hasn't been popular
| for a couple of decades (yes I know it's still running a lot of
| stuff, but try to hire a Perl dev in 2024), good luck.
|
| Maybe a case where AI could help. But not sure even AI knows
| about RT "scriptlets"
| npilk wrote:
| > You might want to use a contact form to collect structured
| data, so it saves you time processing requests. For example,
| making sure the customer provides the right identifiers for you
| to find them on your systems quickly, or automatically assigning
| queries to the right teams.
|
| As the author alludes to, I think collecting structured data from
| unstructured input (e.g. inbound support emails) is a very
| promising real-world use case for LLMs. The goal would be to make
| it as easy as possible for users to send you information, and
| then use AI to parse what you need out of it. This would lead to
| less frustrated users and even increased response rates (for
| reasons the author mentions).
|
| I've been playing around with this idea at
| https://www.semiform.ai for anyone interested.
| domdomegg wrote:
| This does seem pretty cool. I have not spent too long looking
| at this but a few bits of initial feedback:
|
| 1. Appreciation for an informative site: I like that your
| website actually explains what your product does in simple
| terms. So many marketing sites are impossible to parse, so it's
| cool that this one gets to the point quickly. Bonus points for
| having a live demo without a sign up.
|
| 2. Dealing with uncertainty / edge cases: One worry I'd have is
| that this might miss things that are relevant, or doesn't
| capture uncertainty well. I'd probably want a default of a
| 'flag for a human because this doesn't fit in the boxes well'
| marker by default on all forms. For example, if someone
| responds to the conference example with 'Sure, I'll be there on
| Monday and I wear a size M. Also I am in a wheelchair so will
| need the venue to be accessible - please let me know if it's
| not.', I'd want to make sure this gets flagged rather than the
| automated system ignoring the last part (especially as people
| might expect humans to read the response to an email).
| dewey wrote:
| The rant should be: ,,Don't break your contact form", forms that
| are done well are good for both sides. Better triage on the
| receiver end, quicker response for the sender.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| > There are some organisations that intentionally want their form
| to be difficult to complete - perhaps it's a regulatory
| requirement that you don't really want to comply with. If you're
| doing this, you should probably feel bad.
|
| Bad contact forms I encounter usually fall into this category.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _In theory, your customer might be using an email provider that
| doesn't support encryption - which could lead them to sending
| something to you insecurely and putting them at risk. I think
| most organisations can accept this risk given how rare this is,
| given that this is on the customer's end._
|
| I think we've reached the stage where major providers are
| rejecting messages over cleartext, right? Requiring either
| explicit TLS or STARTTLS?
| lambdaxyzw wrote:
| I seriously doubt it. I've tried to set up my (tiny) company
| email TLS-only, and had to backtrack two days later when two
| different customers complained that their emails were bounced.
| One of them was representing a major national bank. I've lost
| the last bit of hope for e-mail I had.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| The biggest complaint of the author seems to be needing to give
| out his data to fill a form. This is very much intentional.
|
| In my company, almost all of the contact form submissions tried
| to sell us something, sometimes in very deceiving way(e.g. I
| found something broken in your front page which leads to poor
| search engine ranking, and I can help fix it), if not outright
| spam.
| parpfish wrote:
| But this is so frustrating when you need to contact a company
| and you don't have the info they want.
|
| A while back we wanted to have the physical landlines from the
| phone company removed from our house. I found the company, but
| every contact form asked for my account number. If I didn't
| provide one, Id get redirected to their sales team because
| obviously I was trying to create a new account.
|
| I don't remember how I got it fixed other than a lot of time on
| hold.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Support and contact are two different things. Companies
| shouldn't have existing customer to fill the generic contact
| us form.
| nottorp wrote:
| Contact forms are dead. These days you type some text in a box
| and a LLM gives you a few answers that are totally unrelated to
| your problem.
|
| If you want to contact support, you have to threaten to cancel.
| If they even care about that.
| xingped wrote:
| So far I've somehow only run across one LLM support chatbot.
| And it was actually mostly helpful. Not 100% but decent enough.
| Better than the old support chatbots that just go "does this
| FAQ entry solve your problem?" Which it never ever does.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| In my experience LLM chatbots are a net improvement because
| they understand "put me in relation with a human" as opposed
| to the scripted ones that only spit out the FAQ.
| nottorp wrote:
| What? Where are those? I thought support forms, LLM based
| or not, are designed to never put you in touch with a
| human.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| I guess that an LLM is harder to scope and retain, and
| does what it is instructed to. While traditional chatbots
| can only do what they are programmed for (e.g. follow a
| scenario), LLMs are easier to sidetrack. Thus you as a
| client may have an easier time escaping their context,
| especially when it's a generic LLM integration done by
| underpaid contractors.
|
| It really depends, but at least here in france many
| companies start having support over
| whatsapp/messenger/the likes. They used to suck hard a
| few years ago, but my recent experience with sncf connect
| (french railway company) was surprisingly good given my
| issue was working around an idiosyncracy of their system.
|
| YMMV as we are talking about chatbots and not plain old
| forms, thus the interactivity is better and feedback loop
| to escape the LLM's context is faster.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > If they even care about that.
|
| Yea, something I've noticed lately is that companies are
| beginning to be OK with letting go of customers they can't just
| silently and passively milk forever. It used to be, you could
| call up your cable company and threaten to cancel, and they'd
| pass you over to a "customer retention" specialist who will
| give you a deal that lowers your cost to what it was a few
| years ago. Last time I tried that trick, they put me on a brief
| hold and then came back to the phone with "OK, sir, your
| service is canceled as of today. Is there anything else I can
| do for you?" Whoops!
| wrboyce wrote:
| I complained to Amazon a few months ago as one of my
| subscription orders was a few days late noting in the
| complaint that the service "didn't feel very prime". The CSR
| responded by cancelling my prime subscription despite my not
| even nearly suggesting I wanted this! (So, naturally, I
| opened a new complaint about this and received an apology and
| a few months credit added to my reinstated prime
| subscription).
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Sounds like 'AI' interpreting your email as a cancellation?
| Although I have now had LLMs parsing my intent for a
| support question better than the human employee that was
| appointed to me.
| fHr wrote:
| They realy are to rich if shit lile this flys, but I guess
| they realy just made way to much money in the high economical
| times.
| toast0 wrote:
| I, for one, apprechiate a company that will cancel their
| service easily and doesn't have a secret price list only
| available to people that complain.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I've heard of the same thing happening with people trying to
| negotiate a better phone contract. I don't think there's an
| alternative though. The credible threat of losing you as a
| customer is, of course, the whole point.
|
| Reminds me of an old quote: _If you can't walk away from a
| negotiation, you aren't negotiating._
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The real alternative is that you negotiate _with their
| competitor_ and go back to cancel after you get better
| terms there.
|
| Threatening to leave was never a good tactic.
| jmkni wrote:
| My new hobby is trying to jailbreak these AI customer support
| chatbots
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Any examples?
| smegger001 wrote:
| Or send a letter to the legal department. Lawyer generally take
| complaints seriously.
| CM30 wrote:
| Nah, the 2024 solution for getting support is through social
| media. Tag the company account with your complaints, maybe with
| a few extra tags for large media outlets or popular internet
| creators that can amplify it.
|
| For example, almost every instance of a YouTube creator
| retrieving their hacked account in the last few years has been
| from tagging Team YouTube on Twitter or what not.
|
| Seems the possibility of a social media PR nightmare is the
| only thing that moves the needle nowadays.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| ...and that's terrible.
|
| Don't want to sell your soul to Xitter and the Zuckerverse?
| No customer service for you.
|
| And it gives companies an easy metric to prioritise tickets:
| Follower count.
| MyFedora wrote:
| 2024 solution? I don't know about that. Companies typically
| use software to manage these complaints across multiple
| social media platforms. Ever since Twitter began charging an
| obscene amount of money for their API, companies just
| shrugged and said goodbye.
| akudha wrote:
| As I become older (and grumpier) I have realized that _not
| engaging_ is the best thing to do, wherever possible. Dirty
| restaurant / rude staff? Don't go there. Don't like dark
| patterns on a website? Contact forms don't work? Don't use those
| sites. And so on. Two reasons - first, most of the time, these
| businesses _know_ their shit is broken or they 're doing low
| quality work etc. They just don't care. Second, it is good for
| our own stress levels to avoid dealing with shitty stuff.
|
| Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like
| healthcare etc.
| stevenae wrote:
| I co-sign. If I could expand:
|
| When you must engage with sub-par experiences, look to redirect
| in a positive manner. Don't try to brute-force a solution,
| rather, suggest an alternative that the counterpart may not
| have considered.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| As I've grown older, I've learned unsolicited advice is
| almost universally despised (and you have a > 50% chance of
| making an ass of yourself due to lack of context/armchair
| general). Therefore, start with a complaint, and if they
| truly want your feedback, offer it.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It's such a shame. I think I can feel what others do when I
| get unsolicited advice, but I'm able to regulate my
| emotions and either take the advice or explain why it's
| missing context. If only others could have more humility
| and analysis ability. But you can't do too much to change
| others.
| amne wrote:
| Yes. I browse, I see banner (slide, popup, sidebar), I close
| tab.
|
| I have friends that ask me if enjoyed the paragraph about
| something they shared a link to only for me to have to come
| back and say I closed it after reading two words and getting
| interrupted by "Put your email here to read more". Nope. I
| tell them that is not a good web experience for me.
|
| I just hope that more people start doing this.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I agree. I've noticed a strong correlation between friction
| (such as newsletter modals, cookie consent modals, register to
| read, etc.) and low-quality content that is just a waste of my
| time to read. Since I realized this, I've saved a lot of time
| and effort by closing a tab as soon as I see one of these tells
| and not looking back.
|
| I'm really grateful to the low-quality content creators for
| making it so easy to recognize.
| wuj wrote:
| That moment when you want to read a tweet just to be prompted
| to login.
| masfuerte wrote:
| I've been doing this for years. Unfortunately I'm looking for a
| job now and there's no escape from it. The job sites, the
| agencies, the employers' sites - they are all awful.
|
| The best one was an employer's site that described itself as
| "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed,
| badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I
| thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began
| again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same,
| suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty
| parser.
|
| Having to rearrange all this text into the correct boxes was
| annoying enough, but they weren't just vanilla text boxes. They
| were janky javascript abominations that responded to input
| really slowly.
|
| And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> And employers moan that they have trouble finding good
| staff._
|
| Employers have trouble finding good staff _that they can pay
| peanuts_.
|
| A shitty application form is a great filter for people who
| are _desparate_ and will put up with low pay and toxic
| corporate idiosyncrasies.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Reminds me of ASML's yearly whining (they form cartels with
| other tech businesses in the region to keep max
| compensation down and are then acting surprised that they
| can't find local engineers who deliberately avoid the
| company).
| fHr wrote:
| Nice, I can't understand their growth potential could be
| like infinite they operate in the right space and have
| the right tech and fill in a nice niche. But C-suite and
| shareholders dividends need to be maximalized and
| engineeres enslaved I guess. Man I love latestage
| capitalism /s.
| akudha wrote:
| One recruiter asked for my high school scores, from 20 years
| ago. For a 3 month contract job. Another recruiter wanted to
| know my salary expectations first, before giving me a single
| detail about the job. When I refused politely, she yelled at
| me.
|
| There are lots of adults who never grew up, never learned
| words like please or thank you, feel super entitled etc.
|
| It is not our job to help these people (unless they happen to
| be friends or family, even then we can only _try_ ). Best
| thing to do is avoid, and look for good people to talk to, do
| business with. Life is too short to waste on shitty stuff -
| people or otherwise
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| Yeah, Canonical asks you how you performed in your high
| school English class as if that's something you're supposed
| to know.
|
| Is that really a valuable metric for a software engineer?
| akudha wrote:
| My guess is that they are trying to vacuum as much
| information as possible. It is easy to do ("I can do
| nothing, the client is asking for the high school scores,
| not me!"). Who knows what they are doing with that data
| pydry wrote:
| No, the CEO is just fucking weird and doesn't seem to
| mind that he puts people off with his low wages and
| idiosyncratic, drawn out hiring practices.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Tell them you graduated with honors from AP English and
| your teacher called you "the next Faulkner".
|
| Or tell them that your high school didn't offer English
| class, learning was student-led and project-based.
|
| Or you took the GED at 12yrs to skip high school and
| study puffin colonies in Alaska with your aunt.
|
| How are they going to fact-check any of that?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| One memorable part of getting paid coaching for
| interviews was the admonishment "There is no place for
| honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to
| check on your story."
| Karellen wrote:
| A coach that you paid money to advised you to lie during
| a behavioural interview?
|
| Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers
| plenty of information about the way you behave.
|
| I wonder how many lies the coach told you about
| themselves and their qualifications, on the belief that
| you'd never check on their story.
| quaddo wrote:
| Is it possible they're trying to separate out candidates
| who studied English literature as a matter of typical
| high school education vs those who studied ESL back in
| their home countries?
| prepend wrote:
| It's actually good that they are so stupid so soon. It's
| nice to filter those people early than to spend time on the
| application to learn how stupid the organization is.
| fHr wrote:
| fr easy aply is so dogshit, most of these parsers for your cv
| can't handle the most basic shit, with my limited knowledge
| dealing with headless browsing with phantomjs I could come up
| with a better solution in an afternoon easily. Sorry but
| using a parser that can't even read experiences or education
| section to easy in a >10k+ tech company that does software is
| just not bearable.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Hopefully one of the areas that LLMs can actually improve. I
| expect an LLM to fairly accurate parse content from resumes.
| Maybe we even start using plain text resumes.
| nox101 wrote:
| I'd expect LLM parsers to enforce a monoculture in that
| small variations from the norm will mess it up and it will
| downrate/discard lots of edge cases
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I expect that LLMs will be used aggressively by a subset of
| employers for exactly all the lazy and asymmetric power
| reasons that an employee can think of.. being automation,
| the footprint of that employer subset will be much larger
| on the whole, and often be the first or only resort for the
| desperate, uninformed etc applicants
| ykonstant wrote:
| More than one university in the UK had exactly this
| procedure. I eventually gave up on applying, but even before
| that I was 90% sure no meaningful information would reach the
| hiring committee.
| trentnix wrote:
| For sure, job application submission is an awful mess. As a
| rule, I won't apply anywhere that uses Workday, considering
| they require you to create an account to submit your
| application.
|
| Truth is, any company that makes getting a job an awful
| experience (despite every incentive to the contrary) won't be
| any better once you're an employee.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Culture permeates
| justinclift wrote:
| Nah. If you see that kind of thing, just nope out from that
| place and move on to the next one.
|
| There's no shortage of places looking for people. :)
| CM30 wrote:
| Oh god job application forms are a travesty. Every single
| company seems to do it differently, about half of them seem
| to like making the form ten times longer than necessary and
| good luck figuring out whether your submission will actually
| get checked by anyone or thrown straight into the trash by an
| automated system.
|
| And I definitely emphasise with the 'easy apply' auto fill
| crap. Those are incredibly unreliable at the best of times,
| and a waste of time all around.
|
| But the worst ones to me have to be the incredibly lengthy
| 'ask everything' forms that way too many large companies and
| government agencies like too much. The ones which feel less
| like a job application, and more like filing your taxes. Way
| too often you'll go for something on LinkedIn, see a form,
| then notice it says something like 'part 1 of 20' at the top
| of the page because someone at Microsoft thought letting
| companies add a ton of unique questions was a 'great'
| feature.
| wuj wrote:
| Greenhouse and Lever have the most convenient job application
| interface IMO. The application area is one page, which means
| you can navigate using tab. There's also no need to create an
| account and verify email address (Though I understand why
| some portals do that to prevent spams).
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Recently I almost completed one that was equal parts data
| harvesting form and job application.
|
| The original link was through a third-party job board. The
| job board tried to trick me into signing up in order to jump
| to the posting.
|
| The job "app" itself was actually two applications. One was
| an automated resume parser that was just... incorrect. The
| second was a manual-entry form that asked for the same
| information. :D
|
| Funny enough, I got to the "Why do you want to work for A
| Shady Company with Questionable Morals?" series of questions
| I was actually given a chance to stop and sober up to the
| idea:
|
| A human being (allegedly) put together the most byzantine
| hiring process to conceal _something_ , and if they actually
| _do_ hire someone, it will be a self-selected fanatic who
| needs the cash more than the indulgence.
| jjice wrote:
| Completely agree. It may be considered a "loss" if you
| encounter rude staff, but fighting back won't make you "win",
| even if you technically do. Your stress and mental state is
| much better if you just let some stuff go. Obviously not
| everything, but I'd say that probably goes for the majority of
| small annoyances in your life.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| My favorite person on twitter (plinz) had advice that I loved
| and try really hard to follow that's similar to this. If you
| see a discussion or comment online that bothers you or is
| frustrating, the best thing to do is not engage with it.
| Engagement causes that person to post more and effectively
| creates more of the content that you dislike.
|
| E.g. if no one on the internet ever responded to pro Trump
| stuff, pro Trump people would get tired of yelling into the
| void with no reaction.
| akudha wrote:
| Yup, Trump would have likely not won in 2016 if he wasn't
| pushed by the media. I remember the media would not cover
| Bernie, even when he got big crowds. But the media would wait
| for Trump to take the stage, showing empty podium live. ALL
| media (mainstream or social or legacy) know to push
| controversy, negativity etc because it gets them engagement
| which gets them dollars. It is also easy and lazy thing to
| do.
|
| There is a reason politicians push "the other guy is bad"
| rather than "I am good" narrative in their ads. It works
| short term at least while doing long term damage
| qzw wrote:
| There's a meme that we are where we are today in the U.S.
| starting with the Reagan presidency, and there's certainly
| a lot of truth to that. But personally I believe American
| politics began a long downward trend once television became
| the primary medium. We've all heard how JFK outsmarted
| Nixon during their televised debate by wearing a blue
| shirt, because blue showed up as white whereas Nixon's
| white shirt showed up as gray. The visuals of candidates
| began to dominate politics, and people made their
| judgements based that. Would Reagan have even become
| president if he wasn't so good in front of a camera?
| drewcoo wrote:
| JFK didn't just wear shirts on TV.
|
| He managed to convince the dead in Cook county, Illinois
| to vote for him, often several times each! I'd consider
| that a much more impressive first. It eclipses hanging
| chads and Russiagate in more recent elections. JFK won
| the election because Nixon conceded even though there
| were plenty of suspicious circumstances - more than
| enough to justify challenging the results of a very close
| election.
|
| Today the people have so little faith in the system and
| in the candidates that almost half of them don't vote.
| smegger001 wrote:
| I have heard this accusation made about every election my
| entire life the only change.is the canidate and district.
| but when you look into it the numbers of voter fraud
| cases found have been in the low double digits. I think
| its an urban legend at this point.
| drewcoo wrote:
| As I stated above, the Daley machine rigged the 1960
| election. 3 people did prison time for it. That
| absolutely happened.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presiden
| tia...
|
| It doesn't actually matter whether or not election fraud
| is "an urban legend." Faith in the system has been lost.
| That was Nixon's fear and the reason he didn't contest
| the election results.
| tmm wrote:
| > We've all heard how JFK outsmarted Nixon during their
| televised debate by wearing a blue shirt, because blue
| showed up as white whereas Nixon's white shirt showed up
| as gray.
|
| Huh. I always heard that Nixon refused makeup and JFK
| didn't, with the result being about the same: Kennedy
| looked healthy and Nixon looked like a sweaty corpse. But
| considering the quality of TV screens and broadcasts in
| 1960, the shirt thing sounds more realistic.
| rambambram wrote:
| So true! And then you jinx it when you start talking about
| ...
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Unfortunately companies like Anthropic like to provide web
| sites that work long enough to obtain your credit card
| information, then break them in a way that prevents you from
| unsubscribing.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Virtual credit cards and masked email addresses have been
| amazing.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Some banks offer virtual cards directly, but there's also
| Privacy (.com). For masked email I find Firefox Relay works
| pretty well.
|
| I like Privacy because they let me switch banks easily, as
| well as place spending limits, pause or close cards, etc.,
| just like Firefox Relay would allow me to switch emails
| easily.
|
| I believe I use Firefox Relay for everything email-related
| now (I pay $1/mo for my own subdomain), and also use
| Privacy for everything money-related (given they accept
| Privacy cards).
|
| https://emkei.cz is a good "fake mailer" for getting
| outbound email from a Firefox Relay address, for those
| companies that want you to send them an email from the
| address on your account. Basically you send something from
| the company's email to your relay address, then reply to it
| and Firefox Relay will send it to the real company's email,
| but from your relay address.
|
| (You know, this sounds like it could make for a great
| phishing exploit because Firefox Relay doesn't check or
| notify you if SPF/DKIM/DMARC fails on an incoming email,
| and the forward that it does to your personal email will be
| entirely lacking those indicators. So aside from email
| content itself looking suspicious, it could be possible to
| perfectly spoof a real email because the relay step strips
| all the original authenticating information.)
| diarrhea wrote:
| I've been using catchall email for everything for well over
| 5 years now, and it hasn't been useful once since. Regular
| spam filters from my provider and occasionally hitting
| "Unsubscribe" once seem to do the trick.
| CM30 wrote:
| Or have it so it's trivial to sign up online, but cancelling
| requires contacting them via phone/post/whatever. 'Funny' how
| well these systems seem to work when people are giving you
| money, but how much of an unusable mess they turn into when
| it's the other way around.
| Repulsion9513 wrote:
| State Farm wanted me to speak to my agent directly (who
| they had never bothered to change from one down in Texas
| when I told them I moved to Montana), so I gave them
| written notice through the contact form on their website
| and then had to file a chargeback when they charged me
| again.
|
| Got a check from them in the mail a couple weeks later.
| (For $13.83, I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to
| represent)
| scrubs wrote:
| Totally agree - I will just add that 1 or 2 times a year I do
| the opposite. I call out stupid when I see it and spare
| nothing. Clear, straight criticism leveled at management if I
| can find them.
|
| Your right: they know it's screwed up most of the time. But the
| front line is not at root responsible ... and I get a bit of
| extra satisfaction flushing management out into the open so
| they can't hide out.
| trvz wrote:
| > Don't use those sites.
|
| Go harder on that - block those sites in your network outright
| (such as in Pihole). Else you may end up on them in future,
| either by accident (clicking a link) or temptation.
| kkfx wrote:
| > Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like
| healthcare etc.
|
| And that's the reason why you have to engage. Allow things to
| go that way one time, you'll get them all the time. Protest,
| politely but effectively, all the time and things will change.
|
| We all suffer crappy services, if almost nobody protest they'll
| not change, because much of them are used by people with no
| choice, starting from fiscal stuff.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Hear hear! Seconded! And all of the other similar phrases of
| support.
|
| However...I was recently at my neighborhood tavern, and the
| group down the bar from me got my attention in a way that moved
| me to action by wanting to donate to their cause. I asked how,
| and they provided me a URL that took me to a payment portal. It
| should have been that easy.
|
| Instead, it wanted full account creation with username, email,
| phone number, and password with specific requirements. After 3
| attempts of not being able to generate a valid password, they
| decided I had too many at the pub and decided to "help". After
| multiple attempts, they were also unable to generate a password
| to create the account to take my money.
|
| Their own website and all off the unnecessary account creation
| policies actively prevented a successful conversion. I laughed
| and laughed at their folly. Of course, the individuals
| receiving the laughter were not the ones that mattered
| regarding this, so I stifled my smugness in this victory and
| suggested they tell their coworkers.
| mihaic wrote:
| >these businesses know their shit is broken or they're doing
| low quality work
|
| I'm honestly sure about this often, since bad staff might not
| be obvious to the manager without someone pointing it out.
|
| As a general rule though, just giving up on something bad is
| not a terrible strategy.
| andy99 wrote:
| I agree, the only problem is that many companies MO is to take
| your money or otherwise lock you in before you find out how bad
| they are. Sometimes it still makes sense to take the loss but
| sometimes you've still got to actively fight with them to get
| out of whatever construct they're trying to screw you with.
| MrJohz wrote:
| One of the wisest pieces of advice my mother gave me growing up
| was always to think about what you want out of an interaction.
| Before you send a text, prepare an email, write a comment,
| argue a point, etc: what is your goal, and what's the best
| thing you're going to get out of it?
|
| It's really good advice, because it makes it so much easier to
| just let things go. Yes, the website I'm using is awful and
| could easily be done better. Yes, the person I'm taking to is
| obviously wrong. But I'm not going to get anything out of
| getting involved - at best some mild catharsis - and I'll just
| waste everyone's time doing so. So let it go.
| foreigner wrote:
| Tip for "collecting structured data": you can prepopulate the
| email body using a mailto: link with a "prompt" to the sender to
| fill out the data you need.
| junto wrote:
| Good tip. Also, many customers will classify their enquiry as
| "other" anyway.
| domdomegg wrote:
| Great idea! Have added to the article.
| wslh wrote:
| No, my contact form, but just rephrasing the author: why do you
| put a contact form and don't perform QA and best practices on it?
|
| Also, the contact form is just another channel (that should work)
| but not the center of contacts. For example WhatsApp business
| replaces a lot of these forms in many regions.
| domdomegg wrote:
| Yep - strongly agree that if you are going ahead with a contact
| form, you better QA it.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of organisations shifting to proprietary
| social networks being a primary contact method (especially if
| it's that or a broken contact form). But hoping that the
| Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules might make this a
| better experience.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Oof I just built a new client contact form for my company. The
| reason I used a form over email is because (1) a form feels more
| impersonal so I feel less guilty about not responding to
| potential clients I have no interest in conducting business with
| and (2) the form works without JavaScript and I figured
| displaying an email without JS obfuscation would attract more
| spam.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Holy crap the example of the Sanisbury's contact form is a
| _brilliant_ piece of passive-aggressive design. It really screams
| "We do not want to hear from you over the Internet, peon".
| domdomegg wrote:
| I think it is an awful design at present, no doubt about it.
|
| It might not be fully intentional though [1]. I suspect it
| probably started as a more sensible form, with the top text
| being just the first sentence. Then they realised they got
| loads of refund contacts that they preferred to deal with by
| phone so just added the text - without realising how terrible
| this made the UI.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
| miniwark wrote:
| I perfectly understand why a contact form would reject a mail
| with the domain "example.com". This is obviously not a valid
| email domain (and may be the default domain used as greyed
| example in the contact form).
| imaginarypedro wrote:
| test+test@example.com is a perfectly cromulent email address.
| Rygian wrote:
| That's explicitly a fake email address, as it's a special-use
| domain name reserved by IANA to be used as
| example/placeholder.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com
| domdomegg wrote:
| The contact form is linked in the article [1], and it rejects
| genuinely valid emails. You can try it yourself and see it
| doesn't have greyed examples, and that the problem is not
| example.com but the use of symbols. For example,
| greffe_acces@montreal.ca is a valid in-use email [2] that is
| rejected.
|
| example.com was only used to take an example screenshot.
|
| [1] https://adamjones.me/blog/dont-use-contact-
| forms/#:~:text=ma...
|
| [2] https://montreal.ca/sujets/politique-de-
| confidentialite#:~:t...
| neilv wrote:
| > _At time of writing, B &Q's contact form just plainly doesn't
| work1. I am fairly amazed that a retailer with revenues in the
| billions doesn't notice written queries have stopped coming in._
|
| I've noticed customer service forms on brand Web sites are often
| broken, most commonly by some Web backend error at submission
| time, but there are other ways, too.
|
| For some brands, a broken contact form may be incompetence or
| corporate dysfunction. But for some of them, it could be a a lazy
| dark pattern, to reduce customer support costs.
|
| (Dark pattern similar to how, when waiting in a holding pattern
| for telephone customer service, they barge in every 30 seconds,
| to jolt you into thinking they might be picking up, but then
| blare, "Your call is important to us! Please remain on hold, and
| the next available customer service representative will assist
| you." I assume they know they're making the on-hold experience so
| much worse.)
|
| Of the forms that do work, I'd say at least half the time they
| trigger an automated email response to call customer service on
| the telephone. The exact thing you were trying to avoid by opting
| for a Web form, where you could avoid telephone hell, and also
| concisely capture the pertinent information in a way that
| wouldn't get garbled by a CSR (or later by a manager trying to
| hide a problem).
|
| When I have gotten a non-automated email response, it's often
| someone ignoring the message and latching onto a keyword to send
| a boilerplate response. Maybe that's good for a poorly treated
| CSR's metrics, and maybe it also suits someone else's
| metrics/KPIs/OKRs.
|
| _Or_ it 's an entirely new boilerplate form, to be done in
| email, since apparently they asked the wrong things in their Web
| form. Maybe that one is mostly just ordinary corporate
| dysfunction, and it also ends up working for some people.
|
| Separately, for companies that provide a contact email address...
| there's the email bounce messages, when the contact address was
| an email alias that forwards to someone no longer there. Clearly,
| making sure customer service is covered is
|
| When I'm contacting a company, it's usually about a problem they
| should want to know about, such as if they care about safety.
| Though I assume that's not the majority of the kinds of
| complaints they hear. I have sympathy for anyone doing support
| for large numbers of retail customers/users, but if you chose to
| do a business that involves that, you can't be disingenuous or
| negligent about it.
| vzaliva wrote:
| Another issue with these forms is that the communication method
| is asymmetric. You fill out the form to contact the business, but
| their only way to respond is by sending you an email.
| junto wrote:
| That's good for companies though. When dealing with large
| volumes of customers asymmetric is good. Telephone lines get
| quickly overloaded.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Asymmetric, not asynchronous.
| junto wrote:
| Autocorrect. Sorry.
| ocrow wrote:
| The rate of spam to a form is roughly constant over time, whereas
| the rate of spam to a published email address goes up over time
| as the site is repeatedly scanned by spam robots and the address
| added to more and more spammer lists. While spam detection is
| good, it isn't perfect. As your total volume of spam goes up, so
| does the amount that sneaks through the filters. Additionally, at
| a certain point it becomes impossible to look in your spam filter
| for misclassified real email. Eventually you're overwhelmed and
| have to change emails. If you're going to publish an email
| address you have to consider it a burnable resource that you will
| replace once the volume of spam is too high.
|
| If the author hasn't experienced this, I think it must be because
| they haven't done the exercise of leaving a live email address on
| a public website for years.
| squirrel wrote:
| My email address has been on my public website for at least 15
| years, and my spam level is constant and manageable. That may
| simply indicate that I'm not popular enough to encounter the
| problem, of course.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Same for me - I do get spam, and it's frustrating, but the
| level seems to be broadly constant over time. I wonder if
| it's deliberate co-operation between scammers and other spam
| senders, perhaps in order to keep the total amount of spam
| just under the threshold that would cause people to actually
| crack down on the issue. Certainly, receiving only single-
| digit numbers of spam emails each day keeps it _just
| slightly_ away from being my personal number one priority to
| get some proper filters installed.
| domdomegg wrote:
| Thanks for reading the article! I agree it doesn't consider
| this point, and I actually hadn't thought of that.
|
| Semi-empirically, I've run some websites with emails and
| contact forms sitting on them for 5+ years and I haven't
| noticed this effect. Although I must admit I haven't studied it
| quantitively well enough to determine this for certain - I'd
| love to look over the data to see if this is true.
| Unfortunately on all these inboxes spam is deleted
| automatically after some time so I no longer have records. If
| you do have data here, it'd be great to see someone publish
| this and would happily add a link to this analysis!
|
| And theoretically, would a contact form link not also be a
| thing that gets added to more and more lists over time and have
| the same problem? (Although I also didn't notice this pattern
| on contact forms, so I'm not claiming this does happen - just a
| thought experiment on this logic!)
| jltsiren wrote:
| In my experience, peak email spam was 15-20 years ago. At some
| point, I got ~500 messages/day delivered to my spam folder.
| Today the average for the same address is maybe 2 messages/day.
| Spam filters flagging legitimate emails as spam or not
| delivering them at all has long been a much bigger issue than
| any spam that gets through.
| ztetranz wrote:
| If you build a contact form, please at least make it respond
| automatically with a "we've received your message" email. That at
| least gives me some confidence that the back end received it and
| it hopefully went somewhere useful. Without the auto-response I
| always have doubts if it worked or not.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Plus give back all submitted information.
| ozim wrote:
| That's not gonna happen.
|
| I can put your e-mail in and type out all kind of swear words
| or put in phishing link in contact for of a company and you
| would never know it came from me and you would blame that
| company.
|
| I had spammers trying that all the time, multiple times they
| had some confirmation for buyer of their services - well only
| me got that info because from any public form we always sent
| out confirmation and "was it you? if not disregard, please"
| where content went to our special place so it would be safe,
| like our sales person not clicking some bs link from such
| contact form.
| wuj wrote:
| All contact forms should have a feature similar to Google
| Form's "Send me a copy of my response" for recordkeeping.
| rglullis wrote:
| Incredible, just last week there were people ranting about email
| as a communication tool, and I was genuinely surprised because my
| experience is that people still prefer to just send an email to
| support@communick over asking a question on my support Discourse
| instance.
| Animats wrote:
| > You don't want people to fill in your form
|
| The real reason.
| junto wrote:
| For many companies it's a core part of their operating
| procedure. Cost to acquire, cost to serve and churn reduction
| being the core elements that they watch like hawks. Answering
| customer queries eats away at that cost to serve variable.
| syradar wrote:
| I have started searching for "@company-url.tld" to find a public
| email instead of using contact forms
| bilater wrote:
| I'll give you a caveat here. To be clear I think any big company
| should have easy to fill contact forms since they have the
| resources but as a solo dev building projects I get so much crap
| from contact forms. It's not even spam - a significant number of
| users think of the contact form as a chatbot and will ask
| personal/lazy questions.
|
| Sometimes its not even questions. Just one off statements like 'I
| want to use your product'. OK...then use my product?
|
| Its very weird and made me try to hide the form more and add
| extra fields just to add a little friction.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I'm sure I've said this before on here, but I used to work for a
| company that provided a SaaS solution to my countries biggest
| Telecoms provider, and I remember them saying that they actively
| did NOT want people contacting them - I wouldn't be surprised if
| at some point actively "hostile" interfaces cost less than meat
| answering the phones/emails
| smallerfish wrote:
| We're sitting here blaming companies, but lazy, inexperienced or
| insufficiently skilled developers can and should be blamed for a
| significant number of the issues he mentions. The state of
| software on the web in aggregate is generally abysmal. There's
| dozens of factors that could lead to apathy about quality, but if
| you care about UX, you could start by ensuring that what you
| personally produce has excellent UX, and pushing back on peers or
| higher-ups where what they specify for you to build is bad (and
| if you don't know what is good or bad, educate yourself.)
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Yeah, this rubs me up the wrong way. The matter will have to be
| very important to get me to engage. I'll enage maybe 5% of the
| time with contact form
| lxgr wrote:
| One of my favorite EU (or German? not sure) regulations is that
| every company doing business online has to have an email address
| they actually monitor for customer contact.
|
| It's often the only way to get a written answer in a reliable,
| persistent medium from a company. Corporate support chats are
| usually horrible; phone calls leave no proof in case of disputes.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| There are a lot of public services and a big insurance company
| quoted as examples in the blog post. From my consulting
| experience I can easily imagine how much work, meetings and
| ceremony got poured in each of these contact forms. Surely they
| all got enterprisey backends with Spring Boot and whatnot. In
| another world a junior dev could create better, faster, more
| ergonomic forms in less time with a more pragmatic approach.
| trvz wrote:
| Contact forms are a way for companies to offload work onto you,
| so the data you're sending them is structured in their preferred
| manner.
|
| That argument goes away with LLMs, which can be decently used to
| process free-form mail. But then, a company with an already awful
| contact form will hardly do the work to implement that.
|
| I guess there's space for a startup doing that and selling it as
| a service.
| paulcole wrote:
| > it incorrectly rejects some valid emails
|
| Stuff like this is a good way to reject people who are likely to
| be annoying to hear from.
|
| And these articles always miss the point that the company doesn't
| necessarily want to hear from _you._
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Also don't send me an email from noreply@. If you don't want my
| email, I don't want yours.
| kkfx wrote:
| I'm one of the few I know off that anytime (almost) I discover a
| crappy service/UI/* I take time to document and protest.
| Unfortunately most people protest only with their friends instead
| of barking at those who made the crap...
|
| If we all take time to write USEFUL feedback than even org run by
| ....... have to take the cry into account.
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