My wife and I are fans of Tim McGraw; we’ve seen him in concert a few times, and we’ll likely see him again in the future. However, his “fan club” is such a disaster that I had to share this here.
We joined his fan club earlier this year because we knew he was coming to Atlanta and we know that fan clubs get early access to tickets. I kept an eye on my inbox, and got all kinds of stuff from them — “tickets now available in Nashville!”, and Seattle, and Miami, etc. I thought it was silly that they were sending me that junk, since they know where I live, but it’s not a big deal.
Later, my wife happened to hear on the radio that the station was having a pre-sale starting the next day. What about the fan club presale? Yeah, it started a few days prior. Of all of the emails I got, that wasn’t one of them…
Waste of Time
So the fan club was a waste of time. Perhaps the email got lost, marked as spam, etc, but I still wanted to leave the club. No need for it anymore. This proved to be interesting.
Contact form?
First I tried their contact form. You can fill it out, but it doesn’t actually submit properly. It just takes you to a blank page.
Twitter?
The link on their home page to their Twitter account doesn’t work. Fortunately, their MySpace account is still humming along…
E-mail?
I tried replying to one of their newsletters, but I never heard back.
Unsubscribe
Ok, since I obviously can’t contact, I figured I’d just use the unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email. Ok. Click the link, enter my email address in the box, get an “unsubscribe verification” in my email. I clicked the link in there to verify my unsubscription and got a 404 error. Wow!
This isn’t new
All of this happened back in early March — more than three months ago — and it’s all still broken. The contact form is still broken, Twitter link is still broken and I just tried to unsubscribe again and got the same issue.
Tim is a great performer, but his fan club is such a huge mess.
Pay Attention
Always remember to pay close attention to your site. None of these issues were intentional (except for failing to respond to my email), and they simply became issues over time. Since the management of the site isn’t likely to be using the contact form or trying to unsubscribe from the emails, they don’t know the problems exist.
I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well; a feature on a site of mine will go down, and I’ll be unaware of it for a few days until a member lets me know about it. Now I try to spend more time going through things and making sure everything is running smoothly.
Have you ever been “trapped” by a site like this, with no good way to contact them or unsubscribe?
