Distasteful pressure tactics from the site that promises to "watch nihonto" for you

[GRC]

Is your inbox getting flooded with messages like this?

 

 

It's complete BS because some of the tsuba I am getting messages for, were sold months ago and even over a year ago... I know because I already own some of them and know other people who own some of the others I am getting messages about.

 

Don't fall for these pressure tactics that are clearly intended to get more members to buy into their fee schedule.

This spam email tactic is built on deception and is unethical.

It seriously undermines the credibility of those who run the site.

 

I urge you all to send them an email asking them to cease and desist, for the sake of all our inboxes LOL 

 

[eternal_newbie]

I imagine this is a software bug - it should be fairly simple for @Hoshi to fix this by adding a check to ensure that notifications are not sent out for items that were already unavailable at the time the crawler/parser picked them up.

 

Or at least add an opt-in setting to receive notifications for "historical" listings, as there are some Big Data nerds out there who want to know about everything that's ever been on the market.

 

Either way, I doubt this is an intended scenario as the volume of emails I've been seeing are rapidly approaching the "ISP/email provider automatically adds it to the spam folder or blacklist" threshold (of course, this will vary depending on exactly how many alerts and notifications you've set up).

[Hoshi]

Hi,

 

This is a very unfortunate software bug indeed. I apologies for the confusion. 

 

Newly discovered items that were previously not found due to issues with the dealer sitemap have been firing this email for items that have been sold ages ago.  The guard in place failed, and the result is this unfortunate spam. 

 

It's fixed now.

 

Your inbox sanity is restored.

 

Best,

 

Hoshi

[eternal_newbie]

Thank you for the fix and the prompt response!

[DanielLee]

As Chris said, it was a bug and he has taken urgent effort to resolve. i can only imagine the costs it takes to implement and maintain a website that updates regulary and isn't full of popups and ads. Since it's a new website it's bound to have issues, so drop a message in the built-in support/help channel and see if your concerns can be addressed. Let's show some appreciation for our fellow nihonto enthusiast who has given us a great free tool to use.

[GRC]

Yes, thanks @Hoshi for the sincere reply and quick resolution. 

It definitely reads clearly now as a glitch as opposed to some sort of nefarious intention, so I completely recant my statements and this post's heading that may have cast aspersions based on my initial reading of your intentions.

 

I really appreciate your efforts.

What you have achieved with that site is truly remarkable.

Edited August 23 by GRC