The fuck off contact page

I thought this this was just going to be about over complicated forms that scare people away.

Back when I was doing client work for a small agency we would get requests for these contact forms that would have 30+ fields, often many of them required. The forms made strong assumptions about why you were contacting them, and if you did not fit that mold the form was particularly painful.

No one wants to take the time to fill this out, you are losing business.

I would always try to talk them into simplifying. All anyone really needed was Name + Email + Text Area but many were insistent and many of these nightmare forms got built. I genuinely wish I had stats on how many people landed on the forms vs actually filled it out.

The worst part was that the vast majority of these just converted into emails to the owner of the small company with no backing database, because we charged extra for that. You'd spend all that time filling out all those fields and they would get concatenated back into a single string (with new lines and field titles).

I'm reminded of this when I try to submit an issue on some of these GitHub repos with wildly overdone templates. I just want to let you know you have a broken link in your documentation but you're forcing me to fill in my OS and build version and last time I went to the dentist and sign a CLA... and I've just not bothered more than a few times. Enjoy your broken link.

The latter is a byproduct of how GitHub's upperhanding[1]/casting couch culture has overtaken the Web community and how a bunch of software gets built, generally. The Shirky era[2] is gone. You're not seen or to be treated as a neighbor showing up with a helpful tip that one of your pipes has burst. You're going to be seen as another person who wants something from them, or, at best, a starlet who can do something for the cigar champers and'll be willing to put up with a lot of crap because you're trying to build a résumé.

This in large part because of two design decisions that GitHub made early on: the contribution graph on profile pages and naming the bugtracker "GitHub Issues" (and promoting a culture where people with support requests are funneled into the same side door as collaborators trying to keep tabs on software defects—i.e. people who need a real bugtracker).

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pez_Dispenser>

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody_(book)>

It depends.

Suppose we are a design agency which build merchandise shops for sports teams. We have specific market knowledge, research, and experience in tailoring these shops to improve the experience for sports fans.

Out of the blue, a logistics company contacts us to help them build a merchandise shop. Could we do this? Sure, but it would require a lot of upfront work and given that it's not our area of expertise could possible result in a subpar experience for both us and the logistics company.

Given such, it's reasonable disqualify such clients. We can do this through our sales process, but by adding a simple "painful" field (e.g., "What sport does your team play?") you encourage such clients to disqualify themselves.

It saves us the work and effort. And it means the clients who get through the form are more likely to be the type of client we want.

There will always be a balance because our ideal clients will always be vaguely defined to some extent. This means some legit clients might get disqualify unnecessarily (e.g., a lacrosse team because we didn't think to include that in the list of sports), but it also means the quality of leads and/or inquiries which come through the forms would be higher quality.

Sure, if you have too much business that you can't be bothered to check these other leads. Same for browser incompatibility: you end up with a form which demands no blocking of anything, many specific js capabilities, MSIE only (I kid - you would think), etc, etc. Each incompatibility might only concern 2% of the population, but the whole mess mostly works flawlessly on the CEO's computer.

A single qualifying question like "What sport does your team play?" is a good direction - instead of the data fetishism of these forms.

I really tried to get it on my own, but please, what is the connection between the Seinfeld Episode "The Pez Dispenser" and the "Casting Couch Culture of GitHub"?

Why do you think there is one?

I was about to ask the same thing! That first sentence confused me