Sifry's Alerts

Technorati Spam? Actually, we just messed up. Sorry!

Whenever someone comes to Technorati and signs up as a member (to get our watchlist services, or to claim a blog, etc) we have an opt-in checkbox to subscribe to the Technorati Newsletter. You can see the form here.

We have been doing this ever since Technorati started, and after about a year hiatus, the Newsletter is back! We're calling it "The Buzz Monitor", and of course it'll have a RSS feed as well for folks who don't want it via email but want it via RSS.

Since it's been a long time since we sent out a newsletter, we wanted to make sure that people who had forgotten about their Newsletter preferences had a chance to opt out again just in case they weren't interested any more in getting a newsletter from us.

So, we sent out that email this morning.

Now here's the whoops - we messed up when we sent out that email. We tried to do everything the right way - we used a third party provider that handles unsubscribes, handles full mailboxes, and makes sure to put in a "Unsubscribe" link that is personalized for each person getting the email. The idea is to make it really easy for people to stop getting the newsletter.

The only problem was that we messed up the link. The first batch of email had a link that sent people over to their Technorati Profile page, where they could un-check the "Subscribe me to the Technorati Newsletter" box on their profile page. That wasn't well thought out, and I apologize. You see, if you're not logged in to Technorati at the time, it will end up taking you to the Technorati signup page, and ask you to sign up as a new member, or sign in! So of course, if you had forgotten your Technorati username or password, you'd be screwed. Bad bad bad on us, and I am sorry for that.

We're fixing that right now, and I'm going to make sure that no new emails go out from us without all of these simple unsubscribe procedures being fixed. This is an issue that we take very seriously here at Technorati.

By the way, I want to thank Adam Kalsey, for pointing out the problem, and for his kind suggestions . He's got a number of examples of companies that have done this both right and wrong, and I want to thank him for his help, criticism, and feedback.

UPDATE: This is now fixed, with the unsubscribe link now doing the right thing.

Technorati Tags: apology, newsletter, rss, screwups, spam, technorati