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Couldn't you write a script to manually go through the pages and click the 'unsubscribe' button? It might be less time/effort on the author's part then attempti

Couldn't you write a script to manually go through the pages and click the 'unsubscribe' button? It might be less time/effort on the author's part then attempting to negotiate with a multi-national conglomerate who will take minimum 1 quarter to ship a 'Unsubscribe All' button. There's a long tail in many products where non-happy-path flows are undoubtedly terrible. But if product teams prioritized addressing that long tail, what would happen to the delayed mainstream features? How would the userbase, in aggregate, feel about such a prioritization? It's disappointing when they say to expect no reply, but it seems like both a practical and efficient outcome. They're an autonomous organization and you can't step in and say "put this at the top of the backlog".

bluefox 6y ago
Yeah, my first thought was to use some XTEST hack. My next one was "does Wayland have something like that?" Quick search brings up uinput, a kernel module... Sorry, ddevault :)
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  Selenium is really cool for that kind of thing, if the webapp is so backwards and broken that you really just need to get into the "click button on webpage" level. Mostly though, I strongly suspect this could have been easily solved with using dev tools and inspecting network requests and a bit of grep/sed/awk/curl/while read line loops. Easier to write a snarky blog post, I suppose.
proactivesvcs 6y ago
The problem with this approach is that it risks one's account being hit by some black box algorithm for detecting abuse, and then spending another few weeks trying to explain to another customer service rep that a) your account hasn't been hacked, b) you are not abusing their service in spirit, even if in action, c) you do not want your account settings reverted because these changes were made by you and then d) no, please do not ban me from the service permanently. All that apart from the fact that it shouldn't be necessary!

bluefox 6y ago

Yeah, my first thought was to use some XTEST hack. My next one was "does Wayland have something like that?" Quick search brings up uinput, a kernel module... Sorry, ddevault :)

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
Selenium is really cool for that kind of thing, if the webapp is so backwards and broken that you really just need to get into the "click button on webpage" level. Mostly though, I strongly suspect this could have been easily solved with using dev tools and inspecting network requests and a bit of grep/sed/awk/curl/while read line loops. Easier to write a snarky blog post, I suppose.

proactivesvcs 6y ago

The problem with this approach is that it risks one's account being hit by some black box algorithm for detecting abuse, and then spending another few weeks trying to explain to another customer service rep that a) your account hasn't been hacked, b) you are not abusing their service in spirit, even if in action, c) you do not want your account settings reverted because these changes were made by you and then d) no, please do not ban me from the service permanently. All that apart from the fact that it shouldn't be necessary!