Reminder: Please update your Mefi contact email if it's getting moldy

January 18, 2013 9:00 AM

This is just a PSA to remind you that we use the email you have attached to your account to answer contact emails from you (unless you change it manually in the email field on the contact page), and sometimes to get in touch with you if there is a problem with a post or comment, so please make sure that it is a working address. You can change or update your email in your profile preferences under "Contact Preferences," as well as choose whether you want it to be visible to other users, and if you want Mefi mail forwarded to your email.

On our end, we only use your email to contact you about site issues specific to you, or to respond to a contact form query; member emails are never used for any other purpose, and never disclosed to anyone else.

Related to this, the contact form is the best, most efficient way for us to respond to site problems and requests since it comes to all of us, so someone can respond right away. Moderator schedules vary, but we answer every legitimate contact form mail from a member (barring occasional, rare oversights or special circumstances) right away. If you contact us via the contact form and don't hear back, check your spam folder to make sure that our response didn't go there. Responses come from the individual emails of the moderators who answer.

Thanks!

posted by taz to MetaFilter-Related at 9:00 AM (39 comments total)

I prefer to think of it as aged.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:05 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

You're not my supervisor!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:06 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Brandon, I'm still going to need you to come in on Sunday, mmmkay?
posted by taz (staff) at 9:09 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]

tps reports...
posted by dfriedman at 9:18 AM on January 18

I've only used the contact form like twice ever but man are those email replies quick and gung-ho to a frankly alarming degree. It's like calling the "Questions or Comments?" 800 number on a pack of Skittles to complain about getting too many green ones and immediately receiving a frantically apologetic voicemail from the president of Mars Inc
posted by theodolite at 9:20 AM on January 18 [14 favorites]

tps reports...

Different media.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:23 AM on January 18

I've only used the contact form like twice ever but man are those email replies quick and gung-ho to a frankly alarming degree.

Ditto. Used the contact form several times, and the response has always come back before I've made a cup of tea.

Which is somewhere between great and unsettlingly good (why do none of the services I pay money for respond anything like as quick as MetaFilter mods?) but do sometimes feel a bit guilty in a "y'know, was only emailing about a minor fix to a post; so very non-urgent and hope it didn't interrupt more important stuff at the mod's end" way.

Think the record was Cortex replying once in easily under 30 seconds from my form query with a several sentence response. Which kinda freaked me out a bit in a time-travel way.
posted by Wordshore at 9:34 AM on January 18 [3 favorites]

Used the contact form several times, and the response has always come back before I've made a cup of tea.

I must have an explanation as to why there is a correlation or causal relationship between these two actions in your life.
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:47 AM on January 18

we only use your email to contact you about site issues specific to you

I will await your emails featuring puppy videos.
posted by elizardbits at 10:00 AM on January 18 [5 favorites]

Oh my god, you reminded people of the Contact Form! Voluntarily!

Wasn't there a cortex Project™ at one point that culled the low-level noise generated from having that open channel hanging out on the web?
posted by carsonb at 10:23 AM on January 18

shitmycontactformsays.tumblr.com!

Nevertheless, we luv the contact form. Luv. With the form, none of us individually feels like we have to check in with our Mefi mail 24/7 or at 2 a.m., or on our day off because someone might have tried to contact us that way to make an important edit, etc. It helps us a lot and we <3 it.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:38 AM on January 18 [1 favorite]

You are maybe thinking of Thank You For Contacting Metafilter.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:41 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Or what she said.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:42 AM on January 18

I've only used the contact form like twice ever but man are those email replies quick and gung-ho to a frankly alarming degree.


Yes, the same thing happened to me last time I made a FPP and made an error (which since I do the former not-so-often and the latter a lot more than I'd like felt important to me but not something I wanted to make a big deal about). It was fixed before I refreshed and I had a response from jessamyn.

I think I may have said this about pb specifically before but the same thing applies to the entire mod team. On one hand, I really wish the rest of the world would give me the quick turnaround and wonderful responses I get here. On the other, I don't think I'd want the world holding me to those standards.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:50 AM on January 18 [2 favorites]

Another shoutout for the joys of the contact form. The mods are always so nice, and so is pb on the technical side, even when I'm a technical goober (which I am).
posted by immlass at 11:16 AM on January 18

Just had to use the contact form not once but twice (forever the n00b) regarding an FPP post have put up. As ever, Mr Cortex replied quickly, briskly and helpfully.
posted by Wordshore at 11:59 AM on January 18

So that Mod Signal light I shine at the sky isn't the optimal way to contact you guys?

Huh. That explains a lot, I guess.
posted by rtha at 12:08 PM on January 18

cortex: "You are maybe thinking of Thank You For Contacting Metafilter."

Oh man I forgot about this. So awesome. But I'm not getting the "notes" to show up and I feel like I'm missing additional hilariousness. Some weird tumblr thing I suppose.
posted by exogenous at 12:16 PM on January 18

Heh. I used the contact form just yesterday at work and was surprised that I hadn't gotten a MeMail response in a few hours.

Of course, the mefi email I have up doesn't get forwarded to my phone and I don't go on webmail in the day so when I got home there were emails dated right after I asked. That'll learn me.
posted by Lemurrhea at 12:22 PM on January 18

I'm not getting the "notes" to show up

Yeah I think you need to be logged in or we need to set a thing or I don't know these newfangled things work.

But email is where I am a Viking! Use your contact form kids, you'll be amazed.

I swear in every place I have ever worked only MetaFilter is where the people with root access to the server are also the people who are answering your questions about the server. Genius!
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:30 PM on January 18 [2 favorites]

The response to the contact form is astounding. Always quick and good natured. If only the local pizza place used it.
posted by arcticseal at 7:50 PM on January 18

I love the contact form and you guys always do a stellar job of addressing whatever problem it is that I am having (or causing). I have always wondered though why it is that you don't use MeFi mail for contact form stuff, at least for users who haven't disabled MeFi mail. Also, what do you do if a lurker uses the contact form but doesn't provide an e-mail address? I suppose there's no way to respond?
posted by Scientist at 7:51 PM on January 18

I have always wondered though why it is that you don't use MeFi mail for contact form stuff

Because the contact form goes to all of us. MeMail is one to one and we can't see each other's MeMail so we have no idea what had been said to a user before or whether they'd made mod requests before. And if someone MeMailed one of us who wasn't working for a few days they wouldn't get a response for a few days which is suboptimal. The contact form will guaranteed be the way to get an answer from a mod the most quickly. If people want to talk to one of us about a thing, they are welcome to drop us a personal note, but we'll reply when we can. I tend to turn off my MeMail when I'm not working because I don't want people sending me mod requests that I ignore because I haven't logged in in half a day.

what do you do if a lurker uses the contact form but doesn't provide an e-mail address?

The contact form auto-fills their email address from their profile which is now a thing you have to have something in. If people blank it out, that's sort of on them. On the rare occasions when people change it to [e-mail] or whatever, we can check the IP address and see if it matches anyone who has posted to MeFi before. I can only remember that working once.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:18 PM on January 18

I think you may have misread my question a little bit. What I was asking is why it is that you don't reply to users via MeFi Mail. Like, if I contact you, I then have to leave the site and go over to my e-mail client to get your response. It would make more sense to me if that response showed up in my MeFi mail.

Also, by "lurker" I don't mean "site member who does not comment" but rather "non-member". If someone is logged out or is does not have an account, and they use the contact form but do not include an e-mail address, are you just powerless to reply?
posted by Scientist at 8:27 PM on January 18

Well it's sort of the same answer, we don't have any magic email-to-MeMail options that users don't. We use email to reply and we reply-all so our replies also go to all the other mods. Then if something needs following up on and one of us isn't working, someone else can handle it. This is not possible with MeMail. A lot of our replies to users aren't just "The answer is X" a lot of them involve some back and forth and that's not really possible with MeMail and it's impossible to keep everyone in the loop that way.

are you just powerless to reply?

If people don't give us a way to reply to them then we can't reply, yes.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:40 PM on January 18

Ooh thanks for the reminder, my email addy is old and moldy on account of the spammers getting their hands on it. I have updated it now thanks to this handy PSA.
posted by 1000monkeys at 10:54 PM on January 18

I wonder if greater clarity would be attained by mentioning again that MeFiMail is not an email replacement. The robust features of email (multi-person conversations, file attachments, formatted text, forwarding, etc.) are never going to be replicated in MeFiMail. It is intended strictly as a one-to-one user backchannel.

Dealing with anything that calls for more than a one-to-one backchannel with MeFiMail is inappropriate. And since contacting the mods naturally requires something greater than a one-to-one backchannel, MeFiMail is an inappropriate (and insufficient) venue for that.

Anyway, 'leaving the site' is hardly a serious complaint, right? I mean, we're talking about a link blog.
posted by carsonb at 7:31 AM on January 19

Anyway, 'leaving the site' is hardly a serious complaint, right?

Where did this come from?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:33 AM on January 19

I think carsonb is referring to this bit from one of Scientist's comments:

Like, if I contact you, I then have to leave the site and go over to my e-mail client to get your response. It would make more sense to me if that response showed up in my MeFi mail.

Which, yeah, email as a full-fledged service is something that needs to happen off-site, which means if the whole interaction didn't start with you sending us a mefimail, it's not going to suddenly start being on mefimail and we expect people to have access to and check the email address attached to their account.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:53 AM on January 19

Scientist: Like, if I contact you, I then have to leave the site and go over to my e-mail client to get your response.
posted by carsonb at 7:53 AM on January 19

Just saying hi, ten years on...
posted by NiceParisParamus at 8:37 AM on January 19

WTF shitmycontactformsays.tumblr.com - are these real or just some kind of in joke?

"TRUE FACTS ABOUT CREATIONAL-SCIENCE&HISTORY-HMAN AND ANIMAL RELATION AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RELIGION AND THE FACTS OF LIFE. -- OMFG!!
posted by marienbad at 11:02 AM on January 19

oh god now I am stuck there!
posted by marienbad at 11:11 AM on January 19

It's all verbatim. People are weird or confused or lost or spammy on the internet, people find contact form, boom.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:26 AM on January 19

Thank You For Contacting Metafilter is marvelous. Thanks for sharing the insanity, the horror, and the sorrow.
posted by sciencegeek at 3:15 PM on January 19

Looking back at the shitmycontactformsays, this one

WK KAN NIE PASSWORD OF USERSNAME ONTHOU NIE IS DAAR N MOONTLIKHEID DAT EK DIT KAN VERANDER KAN GLAD NIE IN MY FACEBOOK INKOM NIE.CALLUSES HCMANDEUP

is pretty dialectishly idiosyncratic even for Afrikans. As far as I can tell though you're totally cool with the lack of redaction.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:29 PM on January 19

Man, I had to wait almost a whole hour once for a response from the contact form. I obviously need to upgrade to CABAL Gold or something.
posted by Mitheral at 12:51 AM on January 20

I like this PSA. As PSAs go, it was very low on terrible kitchen accidents and terrible car accidents. My squick sensors thank you.
posted by maudlin at 3:01 PM on January 20

My email is so moldy I'm curing diseases with it, but oddly it still works.
posted by Deoridhe at 1:57 PM on January 22