I was doing some contract work with an ad agency, client was Cisco, and part of the site was a ‘sign up for this thing’ page - and of course they wanted the ‘subscribe to promotional emails’ box checked by default when the form was presented to the user.
And I was like - nobody actually likes that though. Nobody likes that, people resent it, it’s basically a way to trick people into giving you permission to send them spam.
Everyone kind of laughed and agreed, but the account supe was like “yeah, but it’s what the client wants, so”
Tech lead was walking past my desk on his way out at the end of the day, and he was like, “the thing about the subscription box? Let’s just ‘forget’ to do it and see if anybody notices.”
Seemed like a good thing to do, so we did - but it came back as a QA ticket, and we deprioritized it, until finally the account guy swung by my desk and was like, “I know we don’t like the checkbox thing, but we do actually need to do it.”
And I was like alright fine I’ll do the checkbox thing
wah-wah.
And I was like - nobody actually likes that though. Nobody likes that, people resent it, it’s basically a way to trick people into giving you permission to send them spam.
Everyone kind of laughed and agreed, but the account supe was like “yeah, but it’s what the client wants, so”
Tech lead was walking past my desk on his way out at the end of the day, and he was like, “the thing about the subscription box? Let’s just ‘forget’ to do it and see if anybody notices.”
Seemed like a good thing to do, so we did - but it came back as a QA ticket, and we deprioritized it, until finally the account guy swung by my desk and was like, “I know we don’t like the checkbox thing, but we do actually need to do it.”
And I was like alright fine I’ll do the checkbox thing
wah-wah.