• (cs)

    Was there supposed to be some sort of feedback indicating mail was being/had been sent?

    If not, then I can sort of see a business manager thinking nothing had happened and clicking again. I probably would have too.

    Of course, that's a mistake you only make once.

  • Gumby (unregistered)

    My turn not your turn! No you push the botton I push the button!

  • feugiat (unregistered)

    This was at least partly caused by not giving any visual clue that the button-pushing had an effect.

    Or by the manager not having a clue.

  • JdFalcon04 (unregistered)

    This is why we add little "Loading..." messages with spinny little .gifs on them to our web apps. Clicking buttons lots of times in just about anything web-based can cause bad things to happen.

    Actually it's a good idea to disable such buttons with an OnClick() method to prevent this sort of thing, unless of course said actions by the users will result in your company getting 3 times the money they were going to :D

  • (cs)
    And ten times as many people bothered to find the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message to cut down on the spam

    So their future charges by the bulk mailer will be significantly smaller thanks to alerting and culling all the too-lazy-to-unsubscribe people... where's the WTF?

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Crappy GUI design without adequate feedback leads guy to click button multiple times.

    Pretty weak WTF.

  • Alex (unregistered)

    Ah, the old "let's send an unknown large quantity of emails right from the web thread and except the user to wait 5 minutes for a http response" trick!

    Background worker services people! Or if not clever enough for those, at least the one line of javascript that disables the submit button once the request has been sent.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    The only RTWF here is that they didn't scream at their bulk e-mailer about their crappy interface and demand they only be billed for the first mass mailing, or else they'll nip down to whatever circle of hell these people live in and find another mass e-mail company.

  • Matt Westwood (unregistered)

    How could this be hard? Someone else created all the emails, and sending it out was handled by a "bulk mailer." I call BS on this entire story.

  • Bono (unregistered)

    TRWTF is this article being on The Daily WTF. So some guy clicks a button more than once? Is that really the best submission you got?

  • (cs) in reply to Gumby
    Gumby:
    My turn not your turn! No you push the botton I push the button!

    Ellellator go down the hoooole

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Crappy GUI design without adequate feedback leads guy to click button multiple times.

    I think this should be your missing easy reader version. ^^

    Additionally, the company could make a legitimate case to the bulk emailer that a refund is in order for the second and third click. After all, they could have at least put a warning to only click once if they weren't going to bother designing their GUI properly.

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Was there supposed to be some sort of feedback indicating mail was being/had been sent?

    If not, then I can sort of see a business manager thinking nothing had happened and clicking again. I probably would have too.

    Of course, that's a mistake you only make once.

    Or, in this case, twice.
  • (cs) in reply to Bono
    Bono:
    TRWTF is this article being on The Daily WTF. So some guy clicks a button more than once? Is that really the best submission you got?
    I may have to start digging into some code bases here at work...There's plenty to go around in our old code, especially in the old VB5/6 stuff
  • (cs)

    Let's do the Maths:

    They have sent out 100,000 more e-mails than they were meant to. 5,000 users unsubscribed as a result So it will take 20 runs to break even.

    I have never tried this by the way, but "Do-Not-Reply" e-mail addresses really annoy me, and I would like to see what happened if you e-mailed one with an e-mail apparently from itself.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Oh my lord, you must be joking. How many years have we been using online forms? How many times have we read that little warning next to some submit button that says "Only click the submit button ONCE"? Even non-technical types managed to figure this one out some time in the late 90s, generally the first time they ordered three identical items by hammering the "Buy" button before the page had reloaded.

    But then this is a business analyst so I guess it's par for the course, I wonder if he knows where his ass is and if he would be able to distinguish it from his elbow.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    Additionally, the company could make a legitimate case to the bulk emailer that a refund is in order for the second and third click. After all, they could have at least put a warning to only click once if they weren't going to bother designing their GUI properly.

    What, miss out on billing people several times? That sounds like a business model to me

  • SilverEyes (unregistered)

    Any story that sounds like TheOnion is fine by me, I'm ok with checking both sites every day - I could[n't] care less.

    "Area Man Clicks Button Twice More After Seconds Without Response"

    CAPTCHA: immitto, so imminent you can taste it.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Bono
    Bono:
    TRWTF is this article being on The Daily WTF. So some guy clicks a button more than once? Is that really the best submission you got?
    Seems to be better than the best you can do, Bono. What's the matter, forgot how to submit an article?
  • (cs)

    One time, I typed 

    cat myFile > /dev/sda
    instead of 
    cat myFile > /dev/sdb
    and irrevocably toasted my Windows partition.

    Point being? Mistakes can happen without it being a WTF.

    (On a side note, I never reinstalled Windows; in hindsight I don't consider that act a bad thing).

  • wtf (unregistered) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    The only RTWF here is that they didn't scream at their bulk e-mailer about their crappy interface and demand they only be billed for the first mass mailing, or else they'll nip down to whatever circle of hell these people live in and find another mass e-mail company.

    Perhaps they'll find a bulk email service that doesn't suck quite as much as this one, which is apparently quite a lot. (Quiet, Westwood!)

    On a job like this, you'd typically hand the package and the address list to the service provider ("hand" it electronically, for the overly literal-minded), and the only button to push would be a confirmation that the job is the one you want - you certainly wouldn't have a "send" button that actually triggers the event.

    Most likely you'd want to have both parts in place before the target drop time, which would be scheduled - so the "button" might be pushed a week before the emails are scheduled to go out, leaving time for any last-minute oopsies to be caught. There's no reason at all why "pushing the button" would have to be a live event.

    Nevertheless, I can certainly believe that there are such suck-filled bulk email "services" out there, because people are dumb enough to pay lots of money for stupid, even though it's about the most common commodity around.

  • (cs)

    An extra 100,000 emails? How much could that have possibly cost the company? $10?

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Oh my lord, you must be joking. How many years have we been using online forms? How many times have we read that little warning next to some submit button that says "Only click the submit button ONCE"?
    If I see a warning like that I immediately stop using the site. If the developer doesn't know enough about web design/data integrity/security to make a form submission idempotent, there's absolutely no way I'm sending any more information their way.

    And by the way, I stopped seeing those warnings long, long ago. Designers have by and large figured it out.

  • Larry Erhardt (unregistered)

    Ahh, so this is why Clayton always tells Frank to push the button instead of just pushing it himself...

  • Zack (unregistered)

    Sending the same email is one of the least consequential mistakes a company can make. After all, it's spam: You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)

    Not that I'm very proud of it but my company has repeatedly allowed hundreds of notifications to get mixed up between recipients, so Abe can see Bob's, Carl's and Dean's personal information regarding orders from organizations Abe has never even heard of.

  • (cs) in reply to wtf
    wtf:
    Most likely you'd want to have both parts in place before the target drop time

    :-O Double entendre intentional?

  • West Mattwood (unregistered) in reply to Alex

    The problem is that it starts as a service for yourself and then 5 years down the line, the marketing guy's saying "Why can't I use the mail page?" and when you try to explain that it's a hack, he's all "It looks fine to me!" at which point you bury your head in the sand and hope he goes away.

  • SilverEyes (unregistered) in reply to Zack

    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

  • Stevil (unregistered)
    m:
    Yay, I'm FRIST!
    Congratulations on being so anal that you make sure you are the first person to submit a comment, and so inconsequential as to not have a single interesting thing to say for yourself.

    I suggest you go outside and don't come back until you have something to offer, even if it is a snarky retort.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    Anonymous:
    Oh my lord, you must be joking. How many years have we been using online forms? How many times have we read that little warning next to some submit button that says "Only click the submit button ONCE"?
    If I see a warning like that I immediately stop using the site. If the developer doesn't know enough about web design/data integrity/security to make a form submission idempotent, there's absolutely no way I'm sending any more information their way.

    And by the way, I stopped seeing those warnings long, long ago. Designers have by and large figured it out.

    Oh I quite agree and it's very simple to overcome this issue from a design point of view - something as simple as disabling the submit button in the OnClick method is perfectly good enough most of the time. The point I was making is that this scenario is very well understood, it is an issue that web users have been putting up with for some 15 years. Clearly the bulk e-mail provider had a badly coded web form but that doesn't excuse the business analyst from hammering the button like a child.
  • Skilldrick (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Oh my lord, you must be joking. How many years have we been using online forms? How many times have we read that little warning next to some submit button that says "Only click the submit button ONCE"? Even non-technical types managed to figure this one out some time in the late 90s, generally the first time they ordered three identical items by hammering the "Buy" button before the page had reloaded.

    But then this is a business analyst so I guess it's par for the course, I wonder if he knows where his ass is and if he would be able to distinguish it from his elbow.

    Surely his ass in in his stable... Where do you keep your asses in the US?

  • (cs) in reply to Zack
    Zack:
    Sending the same email is one of the least consequential mistakes a company can make. After all, it's spam: You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)

    Wouldn't this greatly increase the chances of getting blacklisted? If I get a newsletter and don't feel like unsubscribing, I just delete it. If I got three, I would click the little "Mark as spam" button for all three of them.

  • (cs) in reply to Julia
    Julia:
    And ten times as many people bothered to find the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message to cut down on the spam

    So their future charges by the bulk mailer will be significantly smaller thanks to alerting and culling all the too-lazy-to-unsubscribe people... where's the WTF?

    Think about it from a marketing perspective. They don't want fewer recipients, no matter the reason.

    Or we could just say the WTF was that they were reprimanded despite the appropriate outcome.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to SilverEyes
    SilverEyes:
    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

    Are you trolling or did you really not get the point? 1 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0 just as 100 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0. The point was that the OP was implying that 0 is the correct amount of spam to send you customers, and even 1 spam e-mail is too many.

  • uuang (unregistered)

    Remy is punishing us for our insolence! No secret comments?!

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    SilverEyes:
    Zack:
    You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)
    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

    Are you trolling or did you really not get the point? 1 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0 just as 100 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0. The point was that the OP was implying that 0 is the correct amount of spam to send you customers, and even 1 spam e-mail is too many.

    Nah, I think you missed the point, or English class or something. An event that happened once has happened 1 more time than never happening. An event that happened 100 times has happened 100 more times than never happening. Neither has happened infinitely more times than any amount of times.

    If you get one spam message and you wanted zero, you got exactly one more spam message than you wanted.

  • anonymous (unregistered)

    Do you really need a bulk emailing service for 50,000 emails? that doesn't seem like that many

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Skilldrick
    Skilldrick:
    Anonymous:
    Oh my lord, you must be joking. How many years have we been using online forms? How many times have we read that little warning next to some submit button that says "Only click the submit button ONCE"? Even non-technical types managed to figure this one out some time in the late 90s, generally the first time they ordered three identical items by hammering the "Buy" button before the page had reloaded.

    But then this is a business analyst so I guess it's par for the course, I wonder if he knows where his arse is and if he would be able to distinguish it from his elbow.

    Surely his ass in in his stable... Where do you keep your asses in the US?

    Alright then, just for you I'll say "arse". But seriously, that 'r' makes you sound like a pirate: "arrrrrrse me 'arties"!

  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to wtf
    wtf:
    Perhaps they'll find a bulk email service that doesn't suck quite as much as this one, which is apparently quite a lot.

    As far as I know they all suck. I don't know how this situation has persisted. Maybe only bad programmers are willing to work at bulk email software companies? Who knows, but if you are aware of one that doesn't suck, let me know.

    Also, do you even need a bulk emailer to email 50,000 people? That's not even that many. When you get into the millions+ is where it starts to get difficult.

  • (cs) in reply to uuang

    Aww, there were. Apparently editorial decree decided that some of them should be cut, and they all went. Some of them did get a bit silly, I admit.

    Which is sad, because one of the secret comments was an Invention Exchange sketch between Clayton and Joel.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
  • wtf (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    Anon:
    SilverEyes:
    Zack:
    You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)
    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

    Are you trolling or did you really not get the point? 1 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0 just as 100 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0. The point was that the OP was implying that 0 is the correct amount of spam to send you customers, and even 1 spam e-mail is too many.

    Nah, I think you missed the point, or English class or something. An event that happened once has happened 1 more time than never happening. An event that happened 100 times has happened 100 more times than never happening. Neither has happened infinitely more times than any amount of times.

    If you get one spam message and you wanted zero, you got exactly one more spam message than you wanted.

    Oh, dog, here we go with today's mindless philosophizing.

    It is written: "The seeker of knowledge approached a wise man. 'Tell me, Wise One, how is x010F pronounced?' And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Tell me, wise one, may one begin a sentence with a conjunction, or is such a thing forbidden by the laws?'. And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Tell me, your sagacity, is one infinitely greater than zero, or is it one greater than zero?'. And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Oh, great sage, you beat me with the club of cleverness, but I am no more clever than before, how can this be?' cried the seeker. The wise man replied, 'It's actually just a stick, I keep hoping you'll go away if I hit you often enough, but here you are.'"

  • SilverEyes (unregistered) in reply to Markp
    Markp:
    Anon:
    SilverEyes:
    Zack:
    You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)
    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

    Are you trolling or did you really not get the point? 1 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0 just as 100 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0. The point was that the OP was implying that 0 is the correct amount of spam to send you customers, and even 1 spam e-mail is too many.

    Nah, I think you missed the point, or English class or something. An event that happened once has happened 1 more time than never happening. An event that happened 100 times has happened 100 more times than never happening. Neither has happened infinitely more times than any amount of times.

    If you get one spam message and you wanted zero, you got exactly one more spam message than you wanted.

    That was more my point. I wasn't intending to troll, just to be pedantic along the same lines as the 'could cared less/couldn't care less' argument, which I also referenced.

  • SilverEyes (unregistered) in reply to wtf
    wtf:
    Markp:
    Anon:
    SilverEyes:
    Zack:
    You could send 1 letter or 100, it's still infinitely more than the correct amount of spam you should be sending to your customers. :)
    By 'infinitely more' do you mean 1 or 100 more?

    Are you trolling or did you really not get the point? 1 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0 just as 100 is 'infinitely more' [times] than 0. The point was that the OP was implying that 0 is the correct amount of spam to send you customers, and even 1 spam e-mail is too many.

    Nah, I think you missed the point, or English class or something. An event that happened once has happened 1 more time than never happening. An event that happened 100 times has happened 100 more times than never happening. Neither has happened infinitely more times than any amount of times.

    If you get one spam message and you wanted zero, you got exactly one more spam message than you wanted.

    Oh, dog, here we go with today's mindless philosophizing.

    It is written: "The seeker of knowledge approached a wise man. 'Tell me, Wise One, how is x010F pronounced?' And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Tell me, wise one, may one begin a sentence with a conjunction, or is such a thing forbidden by the laws?'. And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Tell me, your sagacity, is one infinitely greater than zero, or is it one greater than zero?'. And the wise man knocked him about the head with the stick of knowledge, but the seeker was not enlightened. 'Oh, great sage, you beat me with the club of cleverness, but I am no more clever than before, how can this be?' cried the seeker. The wise man replied, 'It's actually just a stick, I keep hoping you'll go away if I hit you often enough, but here you are.'"

    yo dogg i herd u like parables so i broke all ur windows so you can profit while u lern

  • wtf (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    wtf:
    Perhaps they'll find a bulk email service that doesn't suck quite as much as this one, which is apparently quite a lot.

    As far as I know they all suck. I don't know how this situation has persisted. Maybe only bad programmers are willing to work at bulk email software companies? Who knows, but if you are aware of one that doesn't suck, let me know.

    Well, I haven't actually sent out the email, but the people who do the bulk mailings where I work seem pretty happy with Lyris. That's where I got the description of a functional bulk email service, anyway. Bear in mind, my only experience with their service is documenting systems that ultimately talk to them, I've never actually used them.

  • SilverEyes (unregistered) in reply to SilverEyes

    But I did really enjoy the story, thanks :)

  • causa (unregistered)

    You forgot the part where the bulk mailer actually charged the company ten times because their bill was in binary, dah-hur, dah-hur!

  • frits (unregistered) in reply to SilverEyes

    Ok! Remy Martin sock puppet count up to 3!

    1. Silver Eyes
    2. Anonymous 3 (possibly) Matt Westwood
  • SilverEyes (unregistered) in reply to frits

    I disagree, but then again, I did see the discussion the other day between between who seemed confused at being called a sock puppet. My sarcasm detector seems broken, it would be a funny comment. Ah well, back to work I guess.

    CAPTCHA: vereor, the sound made veering to not run over things

  • schmitter (unregistered)

    Of course they needed a bulk e-mailer. You have any idea how long it takes to print out 150000 messages, place them on a wood table, take a picture, scan the picture and send them off?

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