These are also bad for accessibility reasons — they generally have a light gray "x" on a white background, which you have to hunt for if you want to dismiss the modal. For normally-sighted individuals, this is a hassle. For people with low vision or motor impairments (e.g. Parkinson's or other tremors), this creates a much bigger problem.
No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
61–70 of 221 posts
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#62Yes, I want to subscribe to your newsletter! Automatically with a browser plugin, with an address that will even accept your mails. Unfortunately no human will read them in the end, but I'm sure your metrics will be great. I might even accept a cookie so you know I'm already subscribed to your great newsletter. Now if everybody were to do that...
What browser plugin do you use?
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#63Publishers should approach everything from the point of view of a person on the street: if it wouldn’t be acceptable in real life, WHY is it acceptable online!? The equivalent of a pop-up newsletter modal is somebody on the street PULLING you aside, standing directly in front of you and preventing you from going any further until you answer their question. All without bothering to observe what you were doing beforeha…
> Why is it acceptable online?
I agree with you, it's not acceptable (and that is an excellent analogy). Aren't content consumers also to blame here as well though? Viewers put up with it anyway. I'm surprised by top google search results that bring up click-bait junk that requires waiting for a page-full of ads to load and then requires that you click through 10 more pages before you even get to all the information you needed. I think this is an indication that the majority of people are willing to put up with it because otherwise those sites would have a high bounce-back rates and wouldn't have ranked so high.
Edit: I actually read the article and the author makes this point better than I could:
> The only solution is to unite in changing our behavior. We need to give website operators an ultimatum: Remove the modals, or we leave. And we need to make good on that promise. By closing the browser tab, we can let the bounce rate demand what we as users cannot.
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#64Yes, I want to subscribe to your newsletter! Automatically with a browser plugin, with an address that will even accept your mails. Unfortunately no human will read them in the end, but I'm sure your metrics will be great. I might even accept a cookie so you know I'm already subscribed to your great newsletter. Now if everybody were to do that...
That would be an great app. The user could globally set their fake name and email address -- for example I'd use my old Yahoo mail that I keep for spam storage... in the cloud(tm)!!! The app could query and update a central store of signup sequences for known sites (the names & order of the fields to supply, or even a sequence of fake keystrokes to send when the time comes, kind of like KeePass's auto-type feature).
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#65I made a add-on for myself to shun sites that behave in ways I don't like. It removes links to their sites from every page. It effectively removes them from the internet. I think that's a way scarier scenario for a website owner than just getting their ads blocked. If the list were community driven and widely used, I think site owners would start changing their behavior. I know most people just want the content and d…
You should probably copy that comment into the description on mozilla. If I only read what is there I would not have made the connection.
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#66Publishers should approach everything from the point of view of a person on the street: if it wouldn’t be acceptable in real life, WHY is it acceptable online!? The equivalent of a pop-up newsletter modal is somebody on the street PULLING you aside, standing directly in front of you and preventing you from going any further until you answer their question. All without bothering to observe what you were doing beforeha…
I don't think the street analogy is accurate; it's more like having someone at the door of every store you go into asking for your phone number as you walk in.
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#67NoScript unless they earn the privilege of executing code. I wish whatever spec would have covered the concern had stated script execution MUST prompt the user.
Yes, that's also the way I browse the web since a few years. Otherwise it's a pain to use the web today.
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#68No, I don't want to chat with someone either. So please stop beeping at me and popping up a chat modal.
Blame Intercom for this.
We use Intercom, but not on a site that's easily discoverable - our marketing folks reach out directly to potential clients.
But yes, I fucking loathe that little "plink" noise it makes. Please don't play sounds while I'm browsing.
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#69Yes, I want to subscribe to your newsletter! Automatically with a browser plugin, with an address that will even accept your mails. Unfortunately no human will read them in the end, but I'm sure your metrics will be great. I might even accept a cookie so you know I'm already subscribed to your great newsletter. Now if everybody were to do that...
Just imagine a plugin that searches the page for emails and subscribes their email to themselves.
PS, when forced to give an email (like 5 min ago for this Wifi) just use @mailinator.com with anything prepended.
Re: No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
#70These are also bad for accessibility reasons — they generally have a light gray "x" on a white background, which you have to hunt for if you want to dismiss the modal. For normally-sighted individuals, this is a hassle. For people with low vision or motor impairments (e.g. Parkinson's or other tremors), this creates a much bigger problem.
Some have Aria and actually dismiss with ESC. It's rare