Joost quickly closed spammy listserv service
Today Joost send SSBG members (Super Special Beta Group) an announcement about the availability of the new beta cient 0.9.4. So far so good…
The problem is that the communication vehicle used to make the announcement turned out to be an open listserv server that quickly started filling all SSBG members inbox with roughly 100 email within 2 hours.
Many SSBG members complained that they had been unwillingly enrolled into the email list service and did not want to receive any more emails. It did not took long for SPAM email to start flowing to all recipients until Joost quikly pulled the plug at around 23:47 GMT on Apr 24 2007.
What went wrong! Obviously someone at Joost forgot to see the dark side in providing beta tester with a different communication channel. This is certainly not the kind of “oversight” one might expect from a business that will soon challenge the way we have watched TV. Let hope this is just an isolated incident that will not repeat itself over and over.
Joost certainly has to get better a providing and receiving feedback from it’s beta testers. The listserv disaster was aiming at making communication better… but sadly it turned out to do more harm than good.
Joost will now have to do so damage control and explain why things went so wrong so fast. I feel for those guys. Joost, if you read me, keep up the good work! Don’t let this bring your spirit down! What doesn’t kill you make you stronger.
You can discuss this in the forum.
Your post is a little hard to read, what with the poor grammar. I’m sorry, but is English your first language?
You guessed it right… French is my native language… hence my poor writing!
I’m on that list and it really wasn’t a problem. I don’t know what you mean by an ‘open listserv server’. Members of the list could post to it, what else would one expect?
Damian… people outside the SSBG group could send email to the ssbg@joost.com mail address and all would receive it… The 1st such email was one from yahoo.com. List servers are not the best way of communicating between team members… it is old and there are much better solutions… like a proper forum.
Sadly Joost forum is lacking in feature making it a so so choice for now.
Oh, I assumed someone had subscribed that yahoo group to the list (which is pretty warped).
As for list servers, I think they’re perfect for this kind of thing. Closed forums are nasty
I do wonder who (in this day and age) gets so little email that they counted that list as spam
Maybe they need a better email client.