Contact Form failing to Send

March 20, 2019 8:22 AM

Unfortunately, a bug was causing contact form messages from people with e-mail addresses @aol.com and @yahoo.com.(something) to not be sent.

I'm really sorry. This should now be fixed, and if contact form messages aren't being sent out in the future, I'll receive a notification about that.
posted by frimble (staff) to Bugs at 8:22 AM (25 comments total)

WELL.
posted by Melismata at 8:44 AM on March 20, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thank you. I don’t need it much but it’s nice to know the contact form is there and being looked after. To the whole team: you’re awesome. Thanks for keeping this place running. I don’t know what I’d do without Metafilter.
posted by bilabial at 8:54 AM on March 20, 2019 [4 favorites]

90s kids, amirite?
posted by rhizome at 9:26 AM on March 20, 2019

So you're saying you didn't get my 10 part serial MetaFilter fanfic then?
posted by ODiV at 9:39 AM on March 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

Unfortunately, a bug was causing contact form messages from people with e-mail addresses @aol.com and @yahoo.com.(something) to not be sent.

Was it a DMARC thing?
posted by zamboni at 9:40 AM on March 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't have one of those addresses and I didn't send any contact email, but I still demand some kind of compensation, because you have devalued my metafilter membership.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:41 AM on March 20, 2019 [6 favorites]

So that's why you guys were ignoring me!

consternation fruitflyy libraropus,

[e-mail]
posted by gwint at 11:16 AM on March 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

Sounds more like a feature.
posted by terrapin at 11:41 AM on March 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

metoo!
posted by rhizome at 12:03 PM on March 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

More to the point how can we help these folks with aol email?
posted by sammyo at 12:32 PM on March 20, 2019 [8 favorites]

More to the point how can we help these folks with aol email?
posted by sammyo at 3:32 PM on March 20

Nuke the servers from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
posted by dazed_one at 1:30 PM on March 20, 2019 [2 favorites]

I currently work in an industry where many, many of our end users "don't do email". I talk to people with aol and yahoo addresses almost every day, and at least one "I don't have a computer." a week. It's ... startling.
posted by ApathyGirl at 2:13 PM on March 20, 2019 [4 favorites]

I talk to people with aol and yahoo addresses almost every day, and at least one "I don't have a computer." a week. It's ... startling.

This is also my universe. I have a friend, not just a neighbor, who has an AOL email account he has been PAYING FOR (and not using) since I've known him. He's smart enough to be on Jeopardy! (as in, has been on Jeopardy!) but this is just the way he is.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 2:26 PM on March 20, 2019 [9 favorites]

AAaaah, this explains much. (You can pry my yahoo account from my cold dead hands, or help me go through it an disentangle all the other accounts that I can only access by getting my password sent to this email address. Change is hard.)
posted by kjs4 at 6:18 PM on March 20, 2019

They may laugh now but come the apocalypse they will be banging on your bunker door desperate for knowledge on how babby is formed.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 9:29 PM on March 20, 2019 [4 favorites]

Look, we all know Yahoo is a fantasy baseball/football company at this point. (Speaking of which, if you want to you should join the Metafilter fantasy baseball league--on Yahoo.)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:02 AM on March 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

I don't have one of those addresses and I didn't send any contact email, but I still demand some kind of compensation, because you have devalued my metafilter membership.

I saw Cortex handing out refunds in the Techno-Utopian thread over the weekend; maybe try asking over there?
posted by Mayor West at 9:34 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

I saw Cortex handing out refunds in the Techno-Utopian thread over the weekend

I would love to know the full context behind this, because I am nosy.
posted by stillnocturnal at 3:29 AM on March 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Dude getting his money back after being a member for six years is especially weird. Surely that falls within the timescale of "you know the rules, this isn't a total misunderstanding of what membership here is, you got many full years of membership out of your five bucks, and then you violated the rules" and doesn't require a refund?
posted by Dysk at 3:58 AM on March 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

Sure, but "you are being an ass, go away" is so much more emphatic with a $5 chaser.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:16 AM on March 22, 2019 [3 favorites]

True. On rereading my last comment, I also want to make it clear that I don't mean to complain.
posted by Dysk at 5:21 AM on March 22, 2019

Guy spent six years barely participating and making zero effort when he did, and I was in the mood to call him on his bluff. Not really anything more to that. The five dollars isn't a hard-won prize on my end, and getting banned is a pretty dumb way to recoup it on his, so, eh.

People don't normally ask for their five bucks back unless they're brand new, they're a spammer who got banned, or they're a genuine shitheel looking for something else to be a shitheel about. The first case is no problem, no questions, got that sorted for you; the latter two aren't cases where I'm going to have a realistic opportunity to build a community relationship or model good diplomatic behavior to any useful end. You gotta really get into a very specific niche to reach my "nah, fuck them" threshold, but for folks that do, nah, fuck them.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:16 AM on March 22, 2019 [8 favorites]

There but for the grace of god, etc.
posted by axiom at 3:27 AM on March 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

As somebody who made the disappointing discovery that my long-disused AOL account had at some point summarily erased more than a decade's worth of email from their servers without any notice or warning -- and apparently everybody else's, as well -- I wonder if the problem isn't with the MeFi contact form but rather AOL capriciously memory-holing it on receipt.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:26 PM on March 23, 2019

My first aborted attempts at email in elementary school involved my friend's AOL account summarily blackholing my emails from my Hotmail account, so.
posted by BungaDunga at 7:39 AM on March 25, 2019