Tag: US

7 Reasons Not To Have A Contact Form On Your Website

Okay, up above these words in the menu bar, there’s a page called Contact Us, and we’re beginning to believe that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. In fact, we’re beginning to think we should get rid of it altogether, and we’re coming round to the view that everyone else should too. Now we’re not self-appointed web experts or internet gurus; we’re humourists. If you have a website yourself, we can only advise you to free yourself from the tyranny of the contact form based on our own experience. And, from our experience of having one of the damned things, here are seven reasons to get rid of it.

1. You’ll Have A More Manageable Penis. One of the most frequent things that people use the contact form for is to attempt to sell us penis enlargement pills. And by frequent, I mean we get a lot of penis enlargement offers. In fact, if we don’t visit our inbox for a while it ends up chock-full of enlarged penises. We aren’t really interested in any of these offers (I have a child now, so I probably won’t even need mine for the next eighteen years or so), but it’s a lot of stuff to wade through and ignore. Well, I say ignore, I’m assuming that my writing partner Jon’s ignoring them too. Perhaps he isn’t, though. Perhaps Jon’s buying penis enlargement pills from everyone that’s offering them. It could be that since we’ve been running 7 Reasons, Jon has purchased so many of these pills that his penis has become a major Kent landmark. Maybe ruddy-faced locals in smocks are staring at his chemically-enhanced appendage right now and pointing up at it with awe. Perhaps it’s on Google Earth. Who knows? One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a major hazard to air travellers as the other thing we get offered almost every day is Viagra.

2. You’ll Get To Read Less Gibberish. When the contact form isn’t trying to enlarge our penises, it sends other stuff too. It sends gibberish. Most things containing the subject heading “7 Reasons Contact Form” look like someone just pressed many keys at once. Frequently, we get the message that “sdkjfkl;sdfjsjsdk;” wrote “sjklsdhfkjsdhfjksdfhsjdfhjlksfsdhthurthw”. This is not helpful. In fact, it’s quite scary that “mgklksfdlgjkhg” writes “mxvnbcxn,bvcxb,mvxc” and “hytfhtyhtfyh” writes “vbnmbmnmbnm” on such a regular basis. Our contact page is fairly dull, but it’s not soporific enough to make this many people doze off on their keyboards while they’re reading it. So perhaps this is just the law of averages. Perhaps one person a day actually falls down dead while looking at our contact form. They’re probably dying when they’re reading other posts too, it’s just that we won’t get to know about that. 7 Reasons could be killing them in their droves: We might be the greatest practitioners of genocide since Pol Pot*. Either that, or – I don’t know – but we only get stuff like this from the contact form, not via email or our comments section.

3. Your Life Will Contain Less Mystery. This morning, via the contact form, we received this question: “When does it start airing?” That’s it. That’s the entire message. But what does it even mean? When does what start airing? Is this an enquiry about my laundry? Is this an enquiry about Jon’s penis? 7 Reasons: The Panel Show? Who knows? Certainly not me, and I don’t want to wake up to a mystery of a morning; I’m not Quincy. I just want to wake up to find that it isn’t raining and that there are coffee beans in the house. I would be able to do that if it weren’t for the contact form.

4. Your Messages Will Go To The Right Person. Above our contact form we clearly direct people that wish to write for us to a different page containing a dedicated email address for guest post submissions. This is a (vain) attempt to try to limit the number of identical submissions we receive about car insurance (purportedly all from different people) and to get them sent directly to Jon – who’s in charge of guest post submissions – rather than to me. He’s more patient than I am. He’s calmer than I am. On receiving his ninth identical offer of a car insurance post in a day, Jon’s veins bulge, he turns red, he emits a sound that is part scream, part bellow and part mating call of a rhinoceros and begins to punch the nearest table or wall. I, on the other hand, don’t take receiving them nearly as well. So there’s no likelihood of these things getting used and we just end up getting rather worked up when we receive them. Well, I do.

5. You’ll Feel Better About Yourself. This is from the contact form:

***** wrote:

Hi

My name is *****.

I would like to ask you if its possible to buy the picture of the lemons in a

high resolution (300ppi 160mm x 200 mm).

And if you have it form a other place can you tell me where?

Greetings *****

This refers to a picture of lemons that – in the same way that approximately 99.99999999% of websites source their pictures – we got from Google Images. There’s no way of replying to this person (that amazingly managed to give us their own name three times during the course of a tiny message) without sounding sarcastic. “Dear *****, we did get it from another place. It is available here. Yours sincerely, the 7 Reasons team” would make us look rather mean.

We’ve also received this:

Do you stock a Thermos type water jug to use on invalids bedside, I can’t find one in cataloues.

That’s just heart-breaking. Could we, in all conscience, send a reply saying “sorry, as a humour website we carry no stock of thermal water jugs, could we tempt you with a mildly Francophobic t-shirt?” No. Of course not. So we either have to spend our time researching random queries from confused people or feel really bad about ourselves.

6. You’ll Hear Less About The Colour Of Hats. The other thing we frequently receive via the cursed contact form are offers of help. Technical help. Traffic driving help. Messages that variously offer to help us “engage strategic initiatives”, “harness value-added solutions”, “integrate visionary partnerships” and “orchestrate bricks-and-clicks infomediaries”. A recent message discoursed for so long about white hat SEO, black hat SEO and grey hat SEO that I almost lost the will to live and – had I been viewing the contact form – I would have been in danger of sending myself a gibberish message with my face. As it was, I began to think about purchasing a hat. What I wasn’t thinking about was taking anyone up on their kind offer to improve our website with their baffling and incomprehensible gobbledygook.

7. You’ll Receive A Better Standard Of Correspondence. Groucho Marx brilliantly and wittily advocated exclusivity when he famously said, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member”, and this can be applied to the Contact Form too. Because the contact form makes us too accessible. It’s too easy to get in touch with us. If it were more difficult to get hold of us, then we’d get a better class of correspondence, because the act of having to do a tiny bit of research to find our contact details and paste them into an email program could well cut out the spammers and raise standards. Perhaps the extra time and effort that this will take will cause people to reflect on whether they really need to contact us at all.

It boils down to this: If you have a contact form, it’s a magnet for spam in all its forms: penis-related-spam; gibberish-spam; spam that consists of bizarre utterances from the mad; spam that shouldn’t even be going to you; spam that is just flabbergasting or heartrending in its naivety; spam about hats. The one thing we rarely receive from the contact us form is any sort of meaningful correspondence. That all comes via email or Twitter. We’re going to be brave; we’re going to be bold: We’ve looked at the correspondence we receive via our contact form, and we’re going to disable it. And if you have a website that has one, we recommend you go back through your inbox and have a look at how much worthwhile correspondence you’ve received through it. We’re guessing it’s not as much as you think.

*The level of interest in our latest competition bears this out.

July 18, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons Cash Peters is Awesome

It’s Saturday and, as is traditional at the weekend, the 7 Reasons team are off somewhere avoiding DIY and trying not to see the inside of a shoe shop. So, sitting up straight in an immaculately pressed dinner jacket on the 7 Reasons sofa today poised to inform, educate and entertain us, is regular guest poster, Dr Simon Percy Jennifer Best. Take it away Simon.

Many of you won’t have heard of Cash Peters. If you are one of these people, you’re missing out. He is awesome. Here’s why.

1. Television Reviews One of Cash’s jobs is reviewing US television for the BBC Radio 5 Live programme, Up All Night, though sometimes reviews appear to be an afterthought during his weekly twenty five minute slot. He talks about a seemingly random assortment of stuff including; the neighbours he suspected of being in a witness protection programme, burying a lady’s dog behind his garage, the ghost in his house, celebrity encounters in LA, the space shuttle and Idaho. But it is when reviewing television that he is at his best. He described Downton Abbey as “Upstairs Downstairs with a bit more upstairs” and the ABC show Skating with the Stars as “Rather like Dancing with the Stars, except with no dancing and no stars”. He has also managed to mock Piers Morgan about the slump in his ratings. Cash Peters is awesome because his TV reviews are laugh out loud funny.

2. Longevity. Cash’s regular BBC 5 live slot has been running for thirteen years. This is an impressively long time for any radio feature where things generally last for a few weeks or, if they’re really special, about a year before being dropped. The only other slot that has been running this long on late night radio is Dotun Adebayo’s Virtual Bookshelf.* Despite this Wogan-esque longevity Cash still has all his own hair, has never worn a cardigan, and the slot still feels fresh and interesting. Cash Peters is awesome because his slot – though long lasting – remains vibrant.

3. Location, Location, Location. Cash is probably most famous, worldwide, for his all-too-short-lived travel show: Stranded with Cash Peters. In this show, he travelled to lots of exotic locations and basically lived rough. However, that isn’t why he’s is awesome, it’s his radio broadcasting that marks him out. After using a studio in LA for years (where he was basically squatting) he switched to broadcasting from home. At first he did this from inside his sauna, until it was discovered that this made him sound like he was talking from inside a small wooden box.** He now broadcasts from his living room floor surrounded by cables and his laptop. He has to put up with numerous technical difficulties but despite this he always entertains. Cash Peters is awesome: He is his own sound engineer, producer and studio manager.

4. Timing. Cash’s slot on BBC Radio 5 Live is broadcast on a Tuesday night/Wednesday morning at 2:35 am. This is not exactly a prime time slot. It is, however, the prime slot for insomniacs, lorry drivers, shift workers and milkmen. All you get on TV at this time is Quiz Call, reruns of Bergerac and Countryfile with sign language. However, the fact that he is on in the middle of the night and doesn’t get the recognition or listenership that he deserves doesn’t diminish his enthusiasm or the originality of his material. Cash Peters is awesome because he’s brilliant on radio when the rest of the world is asleep.

5. Diet. Cash Peters likes cake. “Big deal” you might say, “So do I”. Cash eats a lot of cake: Then every so often he does a liver flush or a master cleanse, which is basically a two week regime of torturing your body to discover you have been walking around with a conga eel, a vat of grease and a sizeable quantity of Inca gold in your gut. Cash purges himself, blogs about it, and tells you how healthy he feels as a result. He’s so evangelistic and compelling on the subject that he gets right up to the point of making you think it is a good idea, before he returns to the cake, hamburgers and buffet food, which makes everyone else feel better despite not having been through a liver flush. Cash Peters is awesome because, unlike other celebrities, he is not on a constant guilt inducing diet.

6. Travel. Cash is also a travel writer and broadcaster (or rather he was, he’s now given it up for life in LA with his partner, his cats and his ex-ghost***). He has authored two books, Gullible’s Travels and Naked in Dangerous Places. The second is connected with the TV series Stranded with Cash Peters (currently showing on Discovery Travel and on Living at 5 am and 5:30 am respectively (see what I mean about a milkman’s prime time viewing?)). In these books Cash went to such enticing places as the Museum of Dirt, the Precious Moments Chapel and even further afield to Vanuatu and Alaska. He says on the cover of one book that he eats little and is allergic to just about everything, but still he went and, what is more, he wrote about going. I don’t think he features on the Solvang, California tourist board’s Christmas card list but that is a small price to pay. Cash Peters is awesome because he visited lots of inhospitable, godforsaken and frankly boring places so that you and I don’t have to.

7. Listener Engagement. Cash often jokes with Rhod Sharp (the venerable presenter of Up All Night) that, given the timing, their slot only gets fifteen listeners. This isn’t false modesty but their genuine belief. Sort of. One day Cash set out to find these 15. Not only did he find them (via the medium of Twitter) but he assigned them numbers and established a list. Unsurprisingly the list grew beyond the original 15. Cash has promised to use these listeners to storm town hall meetings, picket book-signings by celebrities, or just to disrupt a taping of Strictly Come Dancing. I for one am looking forward to going for Craig Revel Horwood with a pitchfork. So what if you’re not on the list? Well this is just an example of how Cash engages with his listeners . He’s responds to those fans who tweet him and write into the show. Last year a listener – Brit Homes – wrote to Rhod complaining about the “rubbish programmes” Cash reviews. Did Cash listen to her points and respond in a calm and reasoned manner? Not a bit of it. Cash’s response was the withering: “Well Brit, you clearly have no taste”. Cash Peters is awesome because he engages with his listeners, both positively and negatively but always to the benefit of those he interacts with and always in an entertaining manner****.

*Actually it’s only be going for about six months it just feels like it’s been running since Jimmy Young was on the BBC home service.

** This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He was doing exactly that.

*** They don’t have a ghost anymore, they had their house cleansed.

****Yes Brit I do believe that you needed to be told you have bad taste.

May 14, 2011
Guest Post: 7 Reasons That American Football is Better Than Soccer

It’s the first weekend of the Six Nations, so who better to hand the 7 Reasons sofa to than blogger, occasional 7 Reasons guest poster and sports nut, Richard O’Hagan. And what more appropriate subject for him to write about than…oh…the Super Bowl? Which is also happening this weekend. Apparently.

It’s Super Bowl weekend. What do you mean you hadn’t noticed? How could you not notice? It’s the biggest single sporting event in the world. No other event makes an entire country grind to a halt like the first Sunday in February does in America. You want to know how special it is? It’s one of only three days in the year when Americans actually manage to eat MORE than usual – no matter how impossible that might be to imagine.

Yes, all over America, football fans will be doing their best Mr Creosote impressions, barbecuing as if their very lives depended upon it and convincing themselves that they have room for just one more giant pretzel, before settling down in front of the television for the sporting event of the year. Meanwhile, people like me attempt to stay awake until stupid o’clock in the morning, because despite all of the above the Yanks haven’t yet worked out that there are people elsewhere in the world who like to watch the game, too, so they start the game at somewhere near midnight UK time.

And why do I put myself through this every year? Simple. American Football knocks just about every winter game into, if not a cocked hat, then a football helmet. And that particularly includes what Americans call soccer, because:

1. Fat People Can Play This Game, Too. Come on, when was the last time you saw a fat guy playing what, to avoid confusion, we shall also call ‘soccer’? A really fat person, the sort of guy who would make the 1980s Jan Molby look anorexic. I’ll tell you. Never. Even William ‘Fatty’ Foulkes, the fattest man ever to play professional football, was only average size for an American footballer. It’s an all-inclusive sport, you see, and for some positions on the field being 300lb-plus is a minimum requirement. And it is not just being over 300lbs that counts, because every one of those guys can run 40 yards in less than 6 seconds, and most of them do it in close to 5. Go and try that for yourself. Most of you won’t even come close.

2. And The Players Are Educated, Too. There’s one unbreakable rule in American Football, and that’s the one that says that you can’t play it professionally unless you have been to university for at least three years. Proper university. No going to the Mail Order University of Chipping Sodbury. And no studying nonsense degrees such as ‘The History of Popular Music Since the Spice Girls’. There are guys playing football with degrees from Harvard, from Yale and all of the other elite US universities. Compare that to a sport where Frank Lampard is regarded as educated because he has more than one GCSE.

3. Cheerleaders. Yes, I know that some soccer clubs have tried this, but frankly they are rubbish and wouldn’t even make a high school cheerleading team in the States. Football teams have proper cheerleaders, most of whom have also gone to university to train as cheerleaders. When it comes to grinning inanely, clenching your butt cheeks and waving pom-poms, you have to say that football is the best.

4. Lingerie. Sepp Blatter famously wanted female soccer players to wear skimpier kits. Americans have already embraced that idea and the women’s football is played indoors in little more than lingerie and protective pads. Google ‘Lingerie League’ and you’ll see what I mean. You might think it wrong and you might think it demeaning, but it gets a heck of a lot more television than the women’s premier league does and pays better, too.

5. Adverts. One of the biggest whinges about Football is the number of ad breaks, but in fact you hardly notice them (and see reason number six anyway). But look at the players’ kit. Notice anything? Takes you back, doesn’t it? Back to the era before every soccer team sullied their shirts with advertising. Every kit is pure and unadulterated and you can wear your team’s shirt without in some way providing your own endorsement for some evil corporate monolith and their tax-dodgy, peasant-exploiting ways.

6. Beer. You can drink alcohol at football matches. In most stadia they even bring it to your seat. You can’t do that at a soccer match. And even if you don’t have in-seat service you still need something to do during the ad breaks, and what better to do than getting another beer?

7. Hardness. Every time I see a soccer player lying sobbing on the pitch because an opponent breathed on him, I reach for the sick bag. You want to see proper hard men, watch the US game. And do it without whinging about the helmets and padding, because that just proves that you don’t know why they are worn (the explanation is too long for here). Instead, think of someone like kicker Nate Kaeding, who in 2008 played three games without realising he had a broken leg. That’s ‘leg’, not ‘fingernail’, soccer fan.

So go on, give the game a try. Take Monday off work, stock up on pretzels, doughnuts and tasteless beer, and settle down for some American action. It’s better than football.

February 5, 2011
7 Reasons We Love Propaganda Posters

At 7 Reasons, we’re quite into war and propaganda, and recently, we’ve been putting together some bits and pieces that we’ve used propaganda posters in. We’ve looked at an awful lot of them in the past couple of weeks, and we were astounded at the amount of brilliant posters that we’d never seen before. We thought we’d show you some of the more obscure ones today. We’re sure you’ll agree that each one of them is a reason to love propaganda posters.

1. Tell Her Nothing (1940). Produced quite early into World War II, this extremely rare British poster proved so popular that as soon as the posters were put up, they would disappear – presumably stolen by amorous servicemen. This woman was a more popular pin-up than Vera Lynn in the early war years. We would tell her everything. And give her the blueprints (whatever blueprints are).

2. He Volunteered For Sperm Donation (c. 1945). Used by the Americans after the end of World War II, this poster encouraged virile men to donate their little swimmers to the wives and partners of soldiers killed in action. It was believed that a baby boom would help the economy recover.

3. Syphilis (c. 1944). A poster used mainly in the Dorset area during the build-up to D-Day. It was used to highlight the dangers of fraternising with the allies.

4. Who Smells Of Fish? (c. 1916). In World War I, rationing meant that some foods such as fish were only able to be eaten on Friday. Many citizens ignored this order though and ate their fish on a Thursday. This campaign was created to scare those who cheated by implying that if you ate fish early you would smell.

5. For A Happy, Healthy Job…(c. 1940). While the Battle of Britain was raging in the South-East of England, these posters were everywhere. Women were encouraged to organise themselves and head out into the countryside to search for German airmen that had been shot down and gone into hiding.

6. Women Of Britain. Direct Our Planes! (c. 1943). Due to the sun, it was hard for Allied pilots to focus on incoming German Bombers and Messerschmitts. The British devised a simple solution. They asked women to go out into the streets and point in the direction of the bastards. Our brave boys were able to look down and follow the direction of where the women were pointing. This simple but effective solution proved vital in winning the Battle of Britain.

7. Tell No One (1939). In the early days of WWII, during the phoney war, it was easy to become overwhelmed by the media’s portrayal of the enemy. This poster was issued by the Ministry of Health, to instruct British men on how best to deal with any psychological issues resulting from the constant media bombardment of war-stories.

********************UPDATE********************

Due to the popularity of this post, we have made this series of propaganda posters available for sale in postcard form in the 7 Reasons Emporium. There are also t-shirts.

March 27, 2010