Socially|Mundane

For all you people on the Second Life grid whom have the power to send group notices or wield the power of a Subscribe(Spam)-O-Matic machines to spam people with: a lot of you need help and to get help you need to get a freaking clue.

In order to not flat-out piss people off, try to not send a single "notice" more than once every few days. Once a week would be good. Once a month would be better. Anything more often than a week and you already have half the people you are sending your notice to thinking about bailing. Don't get me wrong - if your notice is so large it requires two or three in a row, that's okay. Just not more often than once a week.

I would rather be spammed only once a week with a blast of three or four or five group notices (from the same group, folks) that complete the same message than have to experience the evil sin of group notices that don't say anything in the notice itself:

Please also note that as I speak on group notices here, I also am referring to those non-group-required spam-o-matic notice machines, a.k.a. "Subscribe-O-Matic".

The absolute worst are the ones that automatically subscribe you just because you purchased something from a vendor (yes: I hate your guts Andy Enfield for even allowing your Hippo products to allow merchants to do this. You need to allow the buyer to effing OPT-OUT.) Or worse, those that actually scan an area where all you need to do is walk past within 96-meters of the scanner and suddenly you start getting spammed with IM "notices" of some new product you couldn't care any less about from a creator you've never hear of.

And the absolute evil incarnate is the one where I tried to find the "unsubscriber" so I could get out of the IM hell I was stuck in where the merchant sent out a new notice every. single. day. about a "new item" and then sometimes ten minutes later a "new special sale" and often they were something to the effect of:

Yes. Really. That's it. All of it. Except for the attachment, of course. Multiple times every day. And what was worse is that it wasn't a group. It was a Spam-O-Matic that I wasn't aware of ever being subscribed to. That also means the "attachment" is actually an inventory offer. So rather than just clicking "ignore" to close the bluebox, I have to click decline again and again.

And I couldn't unsubscribe because the SLURL given is where the sending machine is, not the prim to click for subscribing and unsubscribing. And I have a helluva time even looking for that as the area I teleported into kept causing me to crash (no, not a naughty viewer - it was some corrupt texture on a vendor that kept doing it) - so "frustration" is an understatement here. Solution: IM the person who owns the spam-o-matic, cordially and politely explain that...

No need to be rude. No need to say "and that landmark is in my trash begging to be emptied". No need to explain that "not only will I never, ever visit your location again and buy anything, but I will tell everyone I know about the experience and mention you, your shop and all the rest by name."

Nothing personal, of course. It's not you I hate, it's not even the spam-o-matic. In fact I love those things. It's the dipwad, idiotic uncouth-if-not-outright-unethical way you use it. Zodiac House uses a spam-o-matic. The difference is, rule: it is at the entrance in plain sight of everyone who enters the sim. rule: "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" buttons are clearly marked. Rule: never a message more than once a month at most. Rule: SLURL and how to unsubscribe included in every single message.

Funny, my subscriber list keeps growing rather than shrinking. In fact, often we are asked to send messages more often. In other words, people want to be in our notice list, not clamoring to get out of it. This is what I call qualified potential customers.


So consider this your "freaking clue."