You're making the mistake that this very article is highlighting: it's not just "people" who click links. An overzealous mail client or browser preloading links would force unsubscribe you without your knowledge or ability to undo.

A single step, a button push, to confirm an unsubscription is fine.

> A single step, a button push, to confirm an unsubscription is fine.

No, it really isn't.

Lots of mailing lists operate exactly as the person you replied to mentioned where after unsubscribing you are given a chance to undo that action. That's a far more respectful way to operate.

The user isn't going to see the "Oops! I need to undo" button when their email client helps themself behind the scenes.

Yet somehow lots of places use the click-one-link-to-unsubscribe method and it seems to work. What are they doing differently?

The follow up confirmation screen feels slimy to me like some kind of cable company retention tactic. That's why I called it a dark pattern.

I don't think it's slimy. They could provide a simple, complete unsubscribe button in addition to a list of subtopics to check/uncheck. Maybe I only want to unsubscribe from their blog, or I still want to receive feature update news but not their sales catalog.

As a person who ends up clicking a lot of unsubscribe links: I definitely see it as slimy.

I would rather companies just didn't subscribe me, so having to click an unsubscribe link is already a problem. The more confirmation they have, the more I take it as biased and manipulative.

If I click a link to claims to unsubscribe me, then that's exactly what it should do. I have no problem with a page to manage account preferences, but don't label the UI element that leads there as unsubscribe.

Do you also not like links called "Contact"?

None of your responses acknowledge or challenge the very real problem that automated systems and expected behavior of GET reqeusts impact your desired behavior of click-to-unsubscribe.

In the spectrum of "buttholedesign", using proper web standards to make sure an action is being taken deliberately is far lower than "intentionally low-contrast skip buttons" and "call to cancel subscription".

Are we all going to just ignore the fact that lots of mailing list operators seem to be able to present a link to unsubscribe without triggering the bot problem?

I think having a URL that unsubscribes people just via a GET request is far more likely to cause problems, 'respectful', 'legal', or otherwise.

What definition of fine are you using?

I don't want to be presented with a confirmation box every time I change something. Nobody reads them - they just click the button that will make it go away.

> I don't want to be presented with a confirmation box every time I change something.

That's much broader scope than what's being discussed here.

> Nobody reads them - they just click the button that will make it go away.

That statement is false. Many people read and care about confirmations.

What you're talking about is very specific personal preferences, not what is generally considered "fine".

It's not all that specific. What I'm describing isn't that far off from what Microsoft found when Windows Vista was presenting a lot of UAC elevation prompts.

The thread is talking about situations where an automated system would 'click' the link though. The automated system is probably not going to go "oh oops, resubbed"

You could probably automate the POST action though. Equivalent of $('#unsub-button').click() on the unsubscribe page load