A random general notice item

[hrj]

(Inspired by yet one more email about "someone whose user name is completely unidentifiable has sent you an e-card at this html link which may or may not be the site we claim it is".)

If anyone is ever inspired to send me invitations to view electronic greeting cards, solicitations for school fundraisers, or pointers to similar third-party web sites at which I am promised access to something interesting, exciting, or useful, but where there is no direct personal contact with or content from the person alleged to be the generating party ... don't. Just, please don't. I won't click on them. They will get parsed as spam (at best) or phishing (at worst). If there's some particular site where you truly believe my life will be blighted if I don't view it ... if there's some particular sentiment that you believe can only be conveyed by a particular on-line greeting card ... if there's some particular favor you want from me ... contact me directly and with clearly interpretable sender information (not just a user name). I will be properly delighted and enriched. But if you can't be bothered to make the personal contact, please don't blame me if I can't be bothered to sort out your offering from among the spam.

(Note that the one exception to this is evite invitations, since they now count as a Known Source for me.)

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Agreed, except that I don't have any exceptions. If people think a website is so great I need to know about it, they can write to me about it in their own words rather than being lazy and clicking a box.

There are so many sites that con users into giving access to their address books and then spam everyone on them that I assume any such "invitation" is spam and report it as such. People need to be reminded: NEVER give passwords to a third party. Anyone who asks for yours has dishonest intentions.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Would this include links to New York Times (or other newspaper) articles? (Not that I'm likely to--I don't usually send those to anyone other than my spouse and/or co-workers--I'm just curious.)

[cellio]

Yeah, same here -- tell me in some of your own words or expect me to ignore it, 'cause I just can't be bothered to do the work to mitigate the risk. I'm also not very happy about people giving my email address to sites that are going to turn around and spam me, like eVite. (A bazillion reminders for an event counts as spam as far as I'm concerned.)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'll follow up news links if I'm told enough about it to know why I might want to click. But that gets back to the "personal contact" aspect. If somebody e-mails me and says "there's this cool article about such and such that I thought you'd be interested in at (link)" -- sure, fine. If someone clicks a link on an article that sends a robo-note to my e-ddress, I'm going to interpret it as spam.

[mamaalanna.livejournal.com]

A-bloody-men! My dear old butterfly-brained mother sends me links all the time with generic messages like "This is so funny!" I've explained to her until I'm blue in the fingers WHY this is a bad idea and WHY I'm not going to click on some unknown site and WHY she's picked up viruses and I haven't, but it just isn't getting through. Where's that smiley banging its head against a brick wall when you need it?

[julesjones]

Oh yesssss....

There is precisely one person who can send me links to an electronic greeting card and have the card opened. That's because she makes it extremely clear that yes, it really is her and not some clever piece of social engineering on a virus.