Dissenting Views

[kevin_standlee]

Some of you may recall that a couple of days ago I discussed Montreal's reminder to its pre-supporters that it's time to vote and how one person declared it spam. At that time, I wrote several replies to madfilkentist, who has seen fit to not unscreen or reply to two of them. Given that he has posted new entries since then, I can only assume that he has no plans to ever clear or reply to them. It has been three days, so I'm going to post my replies here so someone can actually see them, even if he doesn't want to acknowledge them.

Reply #1, in response to a reply from madfilkentist:

You're wrong. I've gone into much more detail on my own LJ about why you're wrong.

Yes, I've been around the internet a while. I know about these things. I know that if I give a bid or convention my contact information, I'm telling them that they can contact me. In fact, I want them to contact me. That makes every contact from them solicited. I see nothing at all in such transactions that limits e-mail contacts to discussions of the financial purchase of the membership itself, as you obviously do. But then, I'm obviously not nearly as fannish as you are. And I wouldn't take that as a compliment if I were you.

I'll as you right here the question I asked over there: Pretend you're running a Worldcon bid. The by-mail voting deadline is so close that sending printed pieces of paper through the postal mail is too slow. How do you contact your supporters and remind them that it's time to vote? Remember that a whole bunch of your supporters really do not understand this whole voting process at all.

Reply #2, an afterthought to the first reply:

Actually, I will also pose the case that I cited on my own LJ. Assume for the sake of argument that you purchased a table in the current Worldcon's dealers' room. As part of this, you signed up for the dealers' room announcements list, where the DR coordinator sends out information about the dealer's room.

The DR coordinator then posts a message to you (and obviously, all of the other dealers) saying, "Our Worldcon has the following opportunities for advertising in our publications and at the convention. You might want to buy an ad to try and attract more people to your table. If so, see [address] to purchase advertising." By your standard, is this "spam" or not?

Comments

[caindog.livejournal.com]

This is not about some weird hypothetical where a crazed convention staff is trying to sell you graymarket drugs or help out a Nigerian prince with cash to move. This example is a convention conducting legitimate convention business with its vendors.

If a convention added a big name author to its guest lineup, would it be spam to let the book dealers know in case they wanted to stock up on her works? I think a reasonable person would understand that a convention will send out occasional messages about the convention to people who have paid to join the convention, even the dealers.

The local convention which I help run generally has a short waiting list for tables in the dealer's room. While our level of mass communication is quite low and we have a tight privacy policy (we share our info with nobody), if we had a dealer raise as much fuss about a single relevant e-mail as this then I'd bet we'd be able to find another dealer to replace them the next year.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Spam doesn't have to be about Nigeria. Spam is spam. It is a characteristic of spam that it seeps in under pseudo-legitimate cover.

However, legitimate dealers room business is not spam.

You postulate the convention sending the dealers an updated list of attending authors. That is relevant, legitimate dealers room business. That is not spam.

Somehow you have weirdly jumped to the conclusion that I would find that, or perhaps any e-mail at all to the list, to be spam. But no, I'm distinguishing between legitimate use of the e-mail list, and spam.

A dealer who raised a fuss about the attending-authors e-mail would indeed not be justified. But that's because it was legitimate, relevant business and not spam.

It was the attempt to sell the dealers an ad, not because it was an announcement for the dealers per se but because dealers might be interested in taking ads, that was spam.

If your convention doesn't send spam, good for it. It won't get legitimate complaints, then.