Nag screens! There I am, pootling around the internet looking things up, usually trying to solve a problem and get some simple looking effect to work. Up pops a newsletter subscription nag, taking up most of my screen, with a teeny tiny, almost invisible, x in the top corner a couple of shades darker or lighter than the background. Now, if I like the information I have read, and I like other information on the site, I may want to sign up at some stage but certainly not before I have even read the article or tutorial. Of course, if I do sign up, I use the special “I don’t want my usual inbox filled with your junk email address” and then, when the email arrives, I generally swipe left and consign it, unread, to the trash. Surely there is some less invasive way to grow a mailing list.
I am an inbox neat freak. Anything unread must be dealt with as soon as I open up. Dealt with is read and then answered or noted. Anything that I don’t need or want is deleted unread – 99.9% of newsletters. Every now and then I look at one and think “Now why on earth am I getting stuff from SomeRandomSite.com? I don’t even remember when, or why, or even if, I ever visited that site!” Then comes the grand Unsubscribe day. I picked up a neat tip, use your mailbox search function to search for Unsubscribe and then ruthlessly go through and deal with the lot of them. Which I have to remember to do over the next few days as I have deleted everything as they come in.
Most of my “how do I …” searching generally ends up on the same few sites, all the rest are rehashed garbage (see my rant about that – nifty link added) so don’t nag me everytime I come to visit. Just because I want to find out how to tweak a menu it doesn’t mean I want to know how to change the background colour of something tomorrow and how to align my text vertically the next day. I will come back when I do. If you force me to sign up, I will almost definitely swipe left!