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Why doesn't CactuShop have a 'send link to friend' feature?

Item: #227
Date: 18 Jul 2002
Applies to
v3
v4
v5
v6

Question

I see lots of sites with a 'send link to friend' feature. Why doesn't CactuShop have this? Can you add one?

Answer

We feel that these types of systems serve little purpose and are often abused.

For a start, it takes longer to send a link to a friend using one of these features than using your own browser. You have to enter your email address and that of your friend. Compare this to the ease and speed of which you can send a link from the 'File' menu in IE or Firefox. This springs your own email program, from where you only need to enter your friends email. Assuming you've written to your friend previously, their address will auto complete. Total time - about 3 seconds. No 'send link to friend' feature on a web site is that fast.

Secondly, the system can be abused by spammers to send spam to a third party. It is trivial for a spammer to write a script to post a 'to' address, 'from' address and short message to the form handler, thereby sending their message to recipients using your site. These spams could end up getting your web site's mail server blocked and your site booted off your web host.

Some sites have attempted to stop this abuse with 'captcha' systems that require you to type a random code displayed in an image. This just adds another 5-10 seconds to the process and makes the whole system even more pointless when compared to sending a link direct from your own browser.

Finally, 'send link to friend' systems are often used by sites to collect email addresses for the purposes of spamming them later. They know what those users are interested in, based on the link that was sent to them. Such targeted lists of addresses are valuable to spammers.

Of course it would be possible for us to build a 'send link to friend' feature that did not record the email addresses and so was not 'spammer-friendly'. However, it is impossible for a site user to tell whether the email addresses are stored or not.

For this reason, we believe that responsible web users should respect their friends' privacy and only mail them links directly rather than risk exposing their email address to spammers.

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