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Beware the edge case: I responded STOP to a message years ago, then was unable to receive SMS from a popular money transmission app during the signup flow to cl
by buildbuildbuild 2y ago
Beware the edge case: I responded STOP to a message years ago, then was unable to receive SMS from a popular money transmission app during the signup flow to claim funds that a friend sent me.
After over a month of troubleshooting, it turns out that I had sent "STOP" to that number years ago on a different device (no longer visible in chat history) and now had to send "UNSTOP" in order to receive the phone verification SMS required to sign up for the service. It was a shared number between multiple apps.
- pixelatedindex 2y agoJust wanted to say that I find it curious that you have to text “UNSTOP” and not something like “START”, lol
- lvkv 2y agoUnfortunately, the world is opt-out, not opt-in.
- Scoundreller 2y agoUnless you need a kidney; then we just bury perfectly good ones regularly, and let the donated ones get a bit more stale while we confirm the opt-in eleventy times.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoIt's because of the US Constitution and voters' very firm, consistent, coherent stance on bodily autonomy. Even if we consider it to be costing a life, your say over your body is considered absolute, and no federal, state, or local government is allowed to pass legislation that influences what happens to your body. Just kidding! It's all determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the most conservative perspective of the dominant, favored religion.
- sib 2y agoFor commercial texting in the US, it is supposed to be opt-in. Of course, there are unscrupulous parties who don't respect this.
- dspillett 2y agoThere probably is a START instruction internally, but it won't take action against a number for which there has been a previous STOP. So UNSTOP acts like FORCE START.
- pixelatedindex 2y agoBut then you can have… RESTART?
- dspillett 2y agoIf the process is releasing a STOP (removing or soft-deleting a STOP instruction logged in the DB or some such) then whoever worked on it initially may just have not thought beyond that (especially if English wasn't their first language so unstop might not have sounded any stranger to them than restart). Once something like that is written down and others have seen it, it tends to stick. Of course it could hav ebeen done by someone like me, who is know to give things technically-correct-but-odd names deliberately…
- sim7c00 2y agoit's because of ungood design
- Tagbert 2y agodouble plus ungood!
- gwd 2y agoSo a "stopper" can also mean a plug (i.e., something you shove into the neck of a bottle or a pipe to stop things coming out). "Stop" can also then be a verb which means, "put a stopper into"; and "unstop" can mean "remove the stopper from". Since (it sounds like) this is talking about blocking and unblocking the flow of messages from that number, using "UNSTOP" (remove the thing blocking it) makes more sense than "START"; particularly as the latter seems to imply that you're asking to immediately begin receiving messages, whereas the former simply means to no longer block the messages.
- elfrinjo 2y agoProbably a Cisco engineer who built that
- jaxn 2y agoSTART works as well. At least for numbers provided by twilio: https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-for-opt-out-keywords-SMS-STOP-filtering#h_01FBWGE1XDCR8NWMEZ6MW9G8P8 https://help.twilio.com/articles/223134027-Twilio-support-fo...
- MaxMatti 2y agoWouldn't that also apply if you blocked the number?
- falcor84 2y agoUnblocking might be faster, as it's something you only need to do on your end
- mway 2y agoThat only works if the marketing campaign exclusively uses the number you're blocking. In some cases - for example, political SMS in the US - it turns into whack-a-mole unless you unsubscribe properly.
- aendruk 2y agoYep, US political spam is unblockable. I receive “wait, you’re a Republican, this can’t be right‽” style SMS messages from 10–20 unique phone numbers every day. The FCC’s spam complaint form only accepts one sender number per submission so I’m about 1,300 complaints in so far.
- Mattwmaster58 2y agoA similar thing happened to me with my Amazon account with a forgotten password. I ended up just creating a new account.
- sim7c00 2y agoI find it such a weird thing, maybe it's nice in some cases, but really this is a weird mechanism. Phone numbers are exchanged a lot and repurposed. Most providers/carriers will likely have a do-not-use-for-x-amount-of-time bin to put newly reclaimed numbers in, but after a while, it will always be re-used. hence this kind of issue can happen. In my country there's a place to register to disallow unsolicited marketing and other types of messaging. That's not by number you 'STOP' and hence it won't have such effects. A marketeer/sales company is simply not allowed by law to dial your number for sales/marketing, so they have auto-lookups to that registry to prevent breaching the law. translated, it's the 'do-not-call-me-registry' :D aptly named. it won't stop phishing messages etc., but not much will. if you'd block it from 1 number, they will just use the next number..
- no_op 2y agoThe US has a 'Do Not Call' registry for unsolicited phone calls, but technically doesn't need one for texts because it's illegal to send marketing texts without prior consent in the first place. Thing is, 'consent' often just means failing to notice a checkbox during a signup flow or something, so people end up getting junk anyway. Even more annoyingly, politicians wrote in an exception for themselves. In combination with the way campaign finance works in the US, this means that if you've ever give your number to any political campaign, it will be passed around forever and you'll have multiple politicians begging you for money for months leading up to every election. Each individual campaign/organization seems to respect 'STOP,' but once your number is on an e.g. 'Has ever donated to a Democratic candidate' list, there's seemingly no way to get it off for good. Thanks, Obama. (I gave him $50 in 2008.)
- meowster 2y agoWhat's worse is if someone accidentally uses your phone number when they sign up for something, then you're on the list and never able to get off of it.
- chias 2y ago> technically doesn't need one for texts because it's illegal to send marketing texts It is unfortunately seemingly not illegal to send me political beg-texts multiple times per day, though.
- JaggedJax 2y agoThis happened to me with a major bank. They were using the same number for 2FA and some other types of texts. I got locked out of my account for a while because I had unsubscribed from their marketing texts. What an unbelievably dumb way to send 2FA codes.
- hypeatei 2y agoYet another reason why SMS 2FA should not be used. Shameful.
- jpadkins 2y agoWhat is a better 2FA channel?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _whiteCaps_ 2y agoAn authenticator app or hardware MFA device.
- lelandbatey 2y agoTOTP (thing that generates the 6 numbers every 30 seconds) whether that's a dedicated device (secure but very annoying) or a TOTP app on your phone (what most people use).
- caseyohara 2y agoPassword managers like 1Password also support TOTP, it doesn't have to be an app on your phone.
- joveian 2y agoI at least have a different user account that only does TOTP but it isn't really a second factor if it is on the same device (since the idea is to make getting access to the code significantly more difficult than just getting access to the password). I like this simple TOTP code generator: https://github.com/arachsys/totp https://github.com/arachsys/totp
- aendruk 2y agoI’ve encountered a couple instances of businesses that 1) send me unsolicited marketing mail, 2) react to that being flagged as spam by internally blocklisting me, then 3) silently fail to send transactional mail such as password resets.