“Ad blockers prevented your review submission.”
No, you prevented the review submission, by taking the time out of your day to write a dialogue box that prevents submissions.
I fucking despise this kind of gaslighting. YouTube does it too, with their “experiencing interruptions?” popup that then takes you right to the FAQ section telling you to disable your adblocker and that it may cause problems. no, you drooling fucking simpletons, you are causing problems deliberately, problems I will circumvent without disabling anything out of pure spite.
The fun part: The delays and interruptions are still way shorter and less annoying that being forcefed two minutes of unskippable ads for some irrelevant junk or service.
Yep that’s precisely why I worded the title as I did. Like, you ain’t gaslighting me… my adblocker didn’t prevent shit. I can leave reviews on every other website, I’ve never seen this before. Only on your site has it been an issue, so it sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. Ridiculous.
Meh, I guess they don’t want any reviews then… Sucks to suck, sales will drop and they have nobody to blame but themselves
Sadly I’m sure a company as big as PetSmart has done the math and decided they stand to make more from advertising than from a few lost reviews
And that applies to generally any big company.
Like why bother asking for reviews if you’re Wal-Mart or Target when the shit is still going to somehow sell and customers aren’t usually the brightest when it comes to making purchasing decisions or evaluating what they have bought.
Leaving a review on the company website is pointless anyway.
What’s to stop any malicious merchant from pruning unfavorable reviews? I trust moderated gossip channels with no financial stake in review sentiment over curated marketing advertisements masquerading as “customer reviews”.
Nothing and they do. I once wrote a review that the product caused me issues and it wasn’t safe to use and they didn’t publish it stating that it didn’t meet the website’s guidelines.
I dunno, I disagree. I look at reviews and was, in fact, looking at reviews for the thing I wanted to also leave a review on.
Of course. This makes perfect sense. How would you have anything relevant to say about the product if you haven’t been advertised at in the past twelve seconds?
They probably mostly want to “improve the advertising experience” .
I love the way companies simply refuse to not track us. You guys seen those cookie popups that are like “accept and continue” or “reject and pay” where you have to actually pay to reject cookies? I cannot believe that’s legal at all. Total scumbags.
Literally baked into http is a “referrer URL” option.
None of this is new. It’s literally built into the protocols we use daily.
Very true, you’re right.
It’s just that the sort of “depth” and “breadth” of the tracking has evolved, as well as the ways marketers use that information.
I personally have never seen a pay to reject. What types of websites have you come across that do that? I’m genuinely curious.
A lot of news sites! Let me see if I can find one.
I’m pretty sure I saw it on Autosport earlier today. Just opened it in Chrome (ew) – see screenshot!
Edit: reading the popup, I assume the legal loophole is that you technically CAN revoke consent after accepting, without paying, by visiting a whole separate page and doing it there. Ultra scummy!
Oh! Ok. I was under the impression the verbiage had the word Reject in it somewhere; that’s on me. It makes much more sense now, and I get what you’re saying. Thanks for the clarification!
I actually do think I’ve seen variations in this wording over the course of a few months. I’m going to go digging around sites I think are probably less scrupulous to see if I can find examples.
Boom, gotcha. First absolute rag that came to mind. Check it! Screenshot:
Edit: also it’s totally on me that you thought the word Reject was in there - I put it in quotes and then provided an example that didn’t contain it, sorry! 😂
They’re doing that because of the GDPR.
That’s sort of what I’m saying, though; I would have thought this would have been a violation of some of the guidelines around consent in the gdpr
For gdpr it has to be available for a “reasonable price” from what I remember. Facebook has gotten in trouble for this due to the high price they’re charging.
Which now renders their site useless … I’ll go on your site to look up basic info … then go to your store to get what I want and even visit some other store or service that could give me the same product.
It’s a disincentive to want to use their site in the future.
I’ve stopped using several store websites because of this. Then when I want an actual product … I’ll call the store and ask them to look for the product for me. If they have it great, if they don’t, I’ll look for it elsewhere or figure out some other solution for myself that doesn’t involve any of their dumb websites.
I’m regressing from the internet and use people contact more and more because of this stupidity. I’m going back to the way I did things in the 90s and early 2000s where I would just use their store flyer as a guide, call the local store to ask for something and then go look for it myself because the online services today are so intrusive and needlessly complicated that its faster and more useful to not go online.
Is it possible that their review form functions on some kind of script language that is commonly filtered by ad blockers?
Browsing the site on mobile / without an Ad Blocker, I’m not seeing any ads. Might just need to reduce the filtering level.
I can’t remember what pissed me off but fuck Petsmart.
I switched to Chewy and local pet shops.
We have been shopping local and Canadian-first as much as possible! In this case, I wasn’t even trying to buy something from them, I was just trying to leave a review to warn other potential buyers for something I bought a long time ago.
I’d recommend Chewy.
They probably use a 3rd party for reviews, so the ad blocker accidentally blocks that service
If my ad-blocker is blocking it, I’m certain there’s nothing accidental about it.
I’m as offended by receiving survey requests for any and everything I buy or pay online. If it weren’t disingenuous I’d be fine with it, but it’s usually the retail marketing version of a push poll. There’s no way that they would get that something is off based on the normalized survey values without reading the non-normalized text box that corporate probably doesn’t care about. Therefore, they get a consistent value of 1, (you suck) to every question. If I had a positive experience I just don’t bother unless some poor bastard went out of their way to help me.
I hate what the shopping experience has become in recent years.
It used to be straightforward:
- go to website
- add products you want to basket
- go to checkout
- register, or check out with a “guest account”
- make payment
- done
today?
- go to website
- dismiss cookie notice
- provide ID to verify age (even though nothing on the site should require age verification)
- immediately be bombarded with “subscribe to our mail list” popups, at least 3, with increasing (false) promises of discounts
- be roped into subscribing anyway with a “spin the wheel” that guaranteed doesn’t give you anything useful BUT will ask for all your details and the close button is conveniently blending into the background, totally by accident
- try to browse product list but can’t because halfway through you’re asked to fill out a “short”, 30 minute questionnaire about your experience on the site
- the product detail pages are unreadable AI generated garbage
- when you do add a product to your basket, a new popup recommends a dozen completely unrelated items, with the close button again conveniently camouflaged
- finally you get around to check out, but the checkout process tries to sell three-four more products in just as many popups before you can actually buy what you need
- finally you get to checkout and you’re forced to sign up to email, snail mail, text message, phone call, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, TikTok, and who knows what else marketing messages
- even during the payment you get bombarded with “did you forget to add this to your order?” messages
Imagine if a physical store did this. You go in and immediately three people surround you, not letting you get into the store, to ask for your ID, your details, and so on. Then throughout your shopping, there’s a few employees following you, giving you recommendations, offering “better” products, or “often bought together” options and so on. This continues during checkout, every single item comes with a “you know we have a better option” or “hey this would go well with X” commentary. Then finally on your way out you’re yet again assailed by people trying to grab your wallet to get your personal info…
