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Admin
Better yet, from another noreply emailaddress, to make sure it isn't stopped by some sort of innerloop detection ;)
Admin
God damn all these comments suck.
Admin
Admin
I wonder how many clients Gizmonics Institute could have for a mass-mailing campaign?
Admin
No, the point is the ratio of times you got spam to times you wanted spam. I.e. 1/0 vs 100/0, which regardless of your opinion of dividing by 0, I think most would agree that 1/0 == 100/0. Or, in other words, you got an infinite percent more spam that you wanted. It's like calculating the markup % of selling something you got for free.
Admin
Infinitely longer than 0 messages, that's for sure. (That is to say, 10 times as long, base infinity.)
Admin
Am I the only one that thinks that pressing the button the first time should've set the email status to sent and the subsequent presses should've returned an error?
Also am I the only one that thinks should've is a valid contraction of should have?
Admin
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FROM not OFF OF. Arg, die die die.
Admin
+10. Nice.
Admin
So the WTF is that the web application was not protected against multiple submits?
Admin
I think in this situation, I'd refuse to pay for anything. The company clearly hasn't provided the service they were supposed to provide - the message going out three times is worse than not sending it at all, so if it's due to their UI crapness and their fault, then the whole exercise failed and should not be paid for.
Admin
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In their sleeves. They can't tell them from elbows.
Admin
YES! Exactly, and that was the point
Admin
Incidentally, NoScript has this "Temporarily allow..." feature that works very well when web apps start out saying "Javascript is required."
Addendum (2010-10-14 12:56):
FTFMAdmin
Anyway the original point didn't make sense anyway. The average person will get a lot more pissed at 1000000000 spam e-mails in their inbox every second than 1 every decade. To say it's the same because the ratio is the same (even though it's not) is still wrong. But that wasn't the reason for the ensuing pedantry :-).
Admin
1/0 is not the same as 100/0
Example:
lim (1/x)*x = 1 x->0
lim (100/x)*x = 100 x->0
Admin
I get it! Because seven ate nine!
Admin
Does anyone actually use the "unsubscribe" links? I never trust them to actually work so I always just set up an e-mail filter to automatically block the shit.
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Seriously, this is yet another example of failing to understand that other people don't have your computer. Just because it looks pretty on your screen, that is no guarantee it will look anything similar on another email viewing program.
I got a promotional email a few weeks ago that was solid black -- literally impossible to see any of the content. I sure hope the a-holes who sent it paid a ton of money for airhead "graphics designers" and two tons to the spambotherds.
Admin
Ahh, this reminds me of our own crappy automatic email system.
With an automatic email system, you've probably got groups of emails-- "clients of product X", "prospective clients", etc. And we do too. You'd think you'd set them up maybe as a database table with "group" and "email", or maybe tables of emails and groups with a cross-ref table. You could even do a flat file for each group, with emails entered in plain text.
But no, not us. Ours was built so that each group can't have more than about 100 emails in it. Which means when you want a group of 8,000 emails, you need not 1, but 80 groups. And is there some sort of "super group" to tell you which 80 belong to the large list? Nope. And can you have the same email listed multiple times in different groups? Sure! And what happens when someone wants to unsubscribe? You have to find out which of those 80 groups they're in, and remove them manually. It's great!
But that's not the bad part. The bad part is that rather than send out 1 email to 100 people, it sends out each email INDIVIDUALLY. And that works and all, except that each time it sends something out, it makes a copy on the mail server. So when you want to send out a mailing with, say, a large PDF attachment, it gets written to the mail server hundreds of times.
Because of that fact, you can't send the email to groups in parallel-- doing so brings the mail server to its knees. This has happened several times, where the server whimpers pitifully as it tries to keep a whopping pace of something like 500 emails per minute or so, and suddenly gets swamped with an extra email blast, bringing everything to a grinding halt.
So we're forced to trigger email notifications in series instead. And THAT means that after you "click the button", if you're waiting for that verification email to show up in your test inbox, you might be waiting as much as 30 minutes to see it. ... Making the WTF in today's article a much more likely occurrence.
DaveE
Admin
It needs to end this way.
Admin
You just arbitrarily added the [times] in wherever you fancied, but times more != more times.
e.g. I have 3 times more cake than I wanted: wanted 1, got 3 I am going to have cake 3 more times today: I already had 1 time, I'm going to have it 4 times
Admin
I work as a web developer for a news/magazine website. We have opt-in daily newsletters of the day's top stories, which currently has over 100,000 subscribers.
We use a third party to actually send out the emails. Our CMS contacts the third party via a web service, giving it body of the HTML email and the date and time to send it out.
A few years ago, when our CMS was being rewritten, I tested the newsletter functionality with dates of about a year in the future, with random garbage in the email. Then I would go into the third-party's website and delete the scheduled emails.
Around a year later, the list of subscribers got this weird garbage email. The next day they got another. And another. This went on for several days. I contacted the third party, and it turns out that deleting the email doesn't prevent it from going out. I was supposed to unschedule it. All deleting it did was prevent me from ever unscheduling it again.
Admin
Don't I wish it did, but it seldom does.
Admin
Oy vey.
Admin
I agree, but I didn't add the word "times" in, "Anon" did, and he did it in the second way indicating event occurrences: "more times". "Times" wasn't even in the original post. Anyway pedantry is fun and nitpicking isn't, even though they often seem the same.
Admin
+2 to that.
What I want to know is, how much more business were these guys planning to get from only 50,000 e-mails? Especially since people had been ignoring them for years already. It seemed to me that they weren't offering any new services or products, so what kind of reaction were they trying to get, exactly?
"OMG U GUISE HOEM DEPOSES' LOGO IS RED AND PRUPLE NOW OMFG LETS GO BAI STUFF RITE NAO"
Admin
Glad someone pointed this out. Proper design > javascript crap.
Admin
From the non-wtfness of the last two weeks, it would seem our posters have found a job in the Ivory Tower.
Admin
You guys do know that javascript does more than form validation and annoying popups now, right?
Admin
Although, if you're really that paranoid about Javascript robbing you blind when it validates input, pops up an alert dialog, or disables a button, why use NoScript? Most useful web browsers these days allow you to disable Javascript altogether.
Admin
With the level of mathematical rigor that is apparently acceptable here, you might as well demonstrate that 100/0 is 100 times more than 1/0. "How?", you say?
Simple. Take the ratio of the two: (100/0) / (1/0) = (100 * 0) / (1 * 0) = 100 / 1 = 1 Just have to cancel the zeros to see that 100/0 is in fact larger than 1/0!
Admin
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Actually, I'm pretty sure I did. Those "if" and "of" parameters look pretty familiar. It was a while ago, I don't remember the exact command I wrote. Same vulnerability though.
Admin
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We already did prove that 100/0 is 100 times more than 1/0, but we did it with real math (without dividing by zero like you do). It may have been deleted though in the typical Remy fury or whatever causes the huge censorship.
Admin
Ok, here we go.
First, the obvious interpretation of "an infinite amount more" would be in terms of percentages. Obviously it is impossible to send an infinite amount more of anything when speaking in absolute terms.
Second, it is technically not infinite [percent] higher spam, it is undefined [percent] higher spam.
Third, 1/0 == 100/0 isn't true, or even false, it's just meaningless. It's also meaningless to say 1/0 <> 100/0. They're not numbers that can be compared, they're undefined. There is no accepted rule for comparing two undefined quantities.
Fourth, limits do not apply because we're looking at discrete numbers here. There is no doubt that lim x->0 (1/x)x does not equal lim x->0 (100/x)x however that is entirely meaningless here.
Admin
Javascript's potential is somewhat irrelevant if you disable it in your browser.
Admin
Admin
Some kids were sitting around the breakfast table, with their mother standing. She asks the older child, "What would you like to eat?". He replies, "Gimme some damn Cheerios", whereupon the mother proceeded to smack the child repeatedly about the head with a heavy wooden spatula. After she finished, she asked the younger child, "And what do you want?", to which he replied: "You can bet your sweet ass I'm not having any of them fucking Cheerios!"
Admin
Out of curiosity...never having been involved in a spam campaign...
How much does it cost to send 50,000 emails? Is it a "wtf" amount, or a "wtfc" amount? ("who the f**k cares")
Admin