A directory operator wrote to me directly about the extension I build. Not a bulk blast: my product
by name, a reserved slot, a claim link with a token in it. The offer was specific and it was free,
and one line of it was the reason I bothered.
No admin approval needed. Pick your launch date and you are in.
That is a good offer. Most directories in this category park you in a queue and then ask for
something before they publish you. So I claimed the slot, verified an email code, and started
filling in the form.
The form did not say the same thing
Under the free tier, in its own words: badge verification is required. Below that, a queue, with the
earliest available date more than two weeks out. And then, once every field was filled and I pressed
the button, a screen telling me the listing starts as pending, and that it publishes when I add
their badge to my site and verify it.
None of that is a scandal. Plenty of directories work exactly this way, and they are entitled to
ask for a link back. I have written before about how the followed link gets traded, and this is a
normal version of that trade.
What is worth writing down is that the email and the form describe two different products, and only
one of them executes. The email is copy. The form is the contract. I had read the email carefully,
and it told me nothing true about what would happen.
The default was not free
The other thing I would have missed by reading top to bottom: the tier selector opened with the most
expensive option already chosen, and the submit button at the bottom said Pay Now with an amount on
it. Every field above it was neutral. Nothing about filling in a name, a tagline, a description and
a category suggested that the button at the end had already picked something for me.
I clicked the free tier first, before touching anything else, and the button changed to Claim your
listing. That ordering was luck rather than discipline. I do not think anyone is being tricked
deliberately. I do think a form where the default costs money and the default is set before you
arrive will collect money from people who did not decide to spend it.
What I actually changed
I stopped treating the message that brings me somewhere as a description of the place.
The rule I now use is narrow enough to follow when I am tired: read the terms at the moment of the
irreversible action, not at the moment of the invitation, and read them in the interface that will
carry it out. If the two disagree, the invitation is the one that is wrong, because it cannot do
anything.
The listing stayed pending, and it will stay that way. I do not put other people's badges on my own
site, so the route that publishes it is not open to me, and the operator can approve it or not. That
is their call. What I got out of the exercise is not a listing. It is the habit of reading the
machine instead of the pitch.
Disclosure
I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your
Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free
tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and writing
down what happened. You can find it at blueticks.io.
I checked the submitted page afterwards, from a browser with no session, the way a search engine
would see it. It returns a not found page and asks robots to ignore it. That is the honest state of
a pending listing, and it is the state I recorded.
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