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I have passed this on to our marketing team. Sorry you are having difficulty unsubscribing. In the meantime, feel free to email me (jgc@) from the email that ne
by jgrahamc 5y ago
I have passed this on to our marketing team. Sorry you are having difficulty unsubscribing. In the meantime, feel free to email me (jgc@) from the email that needs to be removed and I will make sure it happens.
- luckman212 5y agoHow many other companies do you know of where the CTO himself jumps in to help on an issue like this (and in 20 minutes, no less!) Cloudflare is awesome.
- Medowar 5y agoIn better companies, where legal blocks marketing from pulling stuff like that, this is not necesarry.
- drunkpotato 5y agoThat sounds like a magical company.
- vageli 5y agoIf you like the sound of that you should consider a career in a regulated industry like banking or healthcare.
- causi 5y agoI'm going to point out that it's only because this is HN and someone here is much more likely to be able to cause PR problems than the average customer. Awesome companies don't harangue people who are already paying them and then make it harder than clicking "unsubscribe" to put a stop to it. I don't think anybody at Cloudflare is terrified that somebody's scorned mistress could wreak her revenge by punching their e-mail into an insecure Unsubscribe box and thus delaying their knowledge of having access to a new beta.
- technobabbler 5y agoYeah but you don't ever really see Google or Amazon or Facebook or Netflix or Spotify on here, except employees commenting unofficially. Cloudflare is on here quite frequently and meaningfully. I'd rather companies communicate, even if (and especially when) they fuck up. It helps that cloudflare isn't too big to fail yet and still trying to get better. Hopefully they'll fix this email situation.
- causi 5y agoYeah but you don't ever really see Google or Amazon or Facebook or Netflix or Spotify on here, In the words of a limbo competition judge, "that's not a high bar".
- Xarodon 5y agoSetting up Google alerts for when your company's name gets mentioned on an exceptionally popular discussion board is not special in the slightest.
- mardifoufs 5y agoHe's been a HN user forever and he is active in threads that are unrelated to cloudflare too. You can just take a look at his profile
- meowface 5y agoIndeed. He has previously mentioned that he set up an alerting system to notify him when Cloudflare is mentioned on HN, as well. So it's a mix of both. His response here was perfectly adequate and beyond what the CTO of almost any other large tech company would ever do. Not that it deserves unbridled praise and admiration or something, but the immediate attacks and "weasel word" accusations from others are really weird. HN is way too cynical, sometimes.
- viraptor 5y agoI know a lot of companies where you can unsubscribe from the mailing lists easily, so their CTO doesn't have to do the PR damage control when they hit a social media front-page. Those companies are way ahead of those with CTO having a google alert setup.
- InCityDreams 5y agoNo, no and absolutely no they're not.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jbverschoor 5y agoIn general marketing teams try to be “smart” like this. I have many many examples of this. It’s the exact same bs as using someone’s contact list to spam them with farmville. Marketers have no respect for their audience whatsoever.
- drunkpotato 5y agoPlease try not to use weasel phrases like "Sorry you are having difficulty..." The poster clearly articulated the very real technical problems they are having with your broken unsubscribe process, doing your debugging work for you, and the phrasing of your response implies that the fault lies with the user. I don't think this was intentional weasel-speak on your part, but do please try to be aware of your audience.
- axg11 5y agoThat is not the impression I got from this reply.
- chipgap98 5y agoHow is "Sorry you are having difficulty" a "weasel phrase"? I don't see how that implies the user is at fault. It seems like you're policing language unnecessarily
- Xarodon 5y ago> How is "Sorry you are having difficulty" a "weasel phrase"? Because it's trying to avoid accepting any responsibility for a problem that is quite clearly Cloudflare's intentional doing.
- core-utility 5y agoHe's not saying that the cause of the difficulty is on the user, simply pointing out that the user is facing a difficult situation (caused by CloudFlare in this case)
- jgrahamc 5y agoNo, I'm not. I'm literally on HN responding almost immediately to the OP and emailing marketing saying WTF?
- esperent 5y agoI've seen you post here on HN a few times and I think you're genuine here. However I also think the previous commenter has a point - "we're sorry you're having trouble and we're looking into it" or words to those effect are things anyone who reports issues to big companies hears over and over again and it usually means "we don't give a damn about you and we're not gonna do anything. Suck it, puny human". For anyone who doesn't recognize you except as a random person who popped up speaking for CloudFlare, it probably seems reasonable to interpret your words as corporate weasel speak, especially on a post accusing your company of potentially illegal behavior. Even if you didn't mean it that way and this does turn out to be an honest and temporary mistake.
- lithos 5y agoYou're lucky this person cares. If there's not an easy unsubscribe I just report it as spam, and hope enough other people do the same that the firm becomes untrusted. Pitting a corp against Google's customer support is a nice revenge.
- n3storm 5y agoNot everybody is using Google/Gmail/Microsoft :( I would like to point out that this attitude (do not take it personal please) helps Google became the world wide communication arbitrer. Do we want that?
- technobabbler 5y agoWell, they're better at it than anyone else so far. Especially compared to the captured US regulators that don't do anything at all. Can spam indeed.
- account42 5y agoIt's pretty easy to stop crime if you kill everyone except your close friends.
- matkoniecz 5y agoI do the same with my Tutanota account.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Xarodon 5y agoThis is exactly how I feel too. If reporting the email as spam is quicker than unsubscribing, that's what I do.
- jgrahamc 5y agoMe too.
- tobr 5y agoLooking forward to a follow-up on how this happened.
- Brajeshwar 5y agoThis is awesome. So, smart companies have monitoring for their brand keywords across key websites/web and jump in to respond the nip the bud before things go bad. I had read somewhere that Gitlab does the same. They have a "How to respond discussions on Hackernews." or something in that line.
- viraptor 5y agoOnly for the easy or tech things though. I was curious if I'll trigger some response about CloudFlare enabling targeted abuse online, but that topic seems untouchable to people doing monitoring.
- technobabbler 5y agoThey're on here quite a bit and regularly contribute.
- hericium 5y agoThey fucked up, possibly breaking the law in the process. It's just fire extinguisher, nothing really awesome. Regarding GitLab, it[1] was discussed here[2]. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relations/developer-evangelism/hacker-news/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30003221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30003221
- pc86 5y agoThis is often true, but [un]fortunately in this case you're letting everyone know you don't really have any idea what you're talking about. JGC is active in non-CloudFlare discussions on HN all the time, and is the CTO. He'd probably be in this thread regardless of his role.
- InCityDreams 5y agoSo why is it even necessary hes on this (particular) thread?
- KennyBlanken 5y agoWhat a masterful evasion of the issues OP raised. There is no excuse whatsoever for requiring someone clicking a link in an email you sent them, to verify their address with you (by clicking a link you sent them.) OP is right, you're engaged in dark pattern techniques and you know damn well that you're doing it. OP: don't give him a pass. Sue him under the CAN-SPAM act.
- throwaway290 5y agoOP does not seem to be "having difficulty". That sounds a bit passive-aggressive, like if OP was a grandma having difficulties with her computer due to age. OP jumped through a lot of hoops and done a solid investigation without much issues. It is clear that it is the system that is having difficulty, or just not doing what it's supposed to do. (The "sorry" further makes it sound more like talking down. Have you noticed how in a hierarchy the bosses are the ones usually saying "thank you" and "sorry"?) The correct phrasing is "it is clear to me our system is broken [for you], let me …". Edited to address the "sorry", it is easy to slip it in without thinking. I'm sure CF rep here did not use that phrasing intentionally either.
- pc86 5y agoSo much wrong with this comment. But the "CF rep" is the CTO.
- throwaway290 5y agoHow is CTO not representing the company in this context?
- zelphirkalt 5y agoI find this kind of funny in a sad way. What does the marketting team have to do with this? This should go directly to the law people in the company and to the engineering team, who fixes it as quickly as possible. Does the law need to be validated first by the marketting team at cloudflare? If they have had any say in how this process works, then they f'ed it up already, breaking the law! Basically being Internet criminals. Might even be intentional to drive their number games.
- JoBrad 5y agoNot sure how it is at your company, but at most companies marketing email is almost entirely handled by...marketing. Their email service provider should have provided review and guidance on the preferences page.
- zelphirkalt 5y agoThis is not about the e-mail itself, but the pages, which are supposed to let you unsubscribe and their way of functioning. Of course it would be best to have a single click link in the e-mail, but even that would require some kind of API in the system. I doubt the marketing department has people working on those systems.
- fmajid 5y agoThose are usually handled by the email service provider. Email deliverability is a speciality in itself, something even a company as tech-savvy as Cloudflare probably doesn't have the skills in-house. Properly handling opt-outs is part of it. MailChimp does the right thing by soliciting feedback, including the option "I never signed up for these emails", hopefully that goes into whatever scoring mechanism they use to kick out abusive customers. Sadly the current state of what passes for front-end development is abysmal, with pages often not working if a user has cookies or javascript disabled, or an ad-blocker. As for JGC, he deserves credit for doing the right thing, but that does not change the fact his company violated the law, and their marketing department richly deserves any fire and brimstone is raining down their necks right now. I would say most companies should probably have their email service provider contracts controlled by legal rather than marketing, most marketing departments have an inherent conflict of interest in this regard.
- sdflhasjd 5y agoThank you for acknowledging this.
- jgrahamc 5y agoIf you didn't throw the email out the window in disgust, could you forward it to me... jgc@cloudflare.com
- everybodyknows 5y agoI'm a shareholder. Sorry to learn your marketing team is damaging the company's reputation in this way.
- Melatonic 5y agoAnd this is why I love HN