The Call of Cth-wool-hu

No, I didn't knit this. Although I'm tempted to do it at some point (I know several people who'd love one of these as a gift). It's more a sort of visual joke; the point being that if you're a site that sells yarn and you decide to call yourself LoveCrafts, you're going to get the Cthulhu jokes whatever you do. Which is fine, but... it probably isn't a good idea if you then act like something out of an eldritch horror story.

Let me explain. I've been buying my yarn from LoveCrafts for several years, and on the whole they've been pretty good. They have an excellent range; the site is well organised; if you have an account, you can keep a personal library of PDF patterns on the site, which is a godsend if your hard drive dies on you (and very useful indeed if it doesn't quite die but does become seriously ill, which happened to me just over a year ago - fortunately the person who sold me this laptop was able to help me retrieve all the data); and their customer service is, for the most part, above average. I've had one or two little niggles with them, mainly connected with the standard of their colour photography; every now and again some yarn arrives that doesn't look anything like it does on the site, and in a few cases I really don't like it and have to send it back. (Not very many, to be sure; usually if it's not what I expected, it's still all right. But I do very vividly recall ordering what I thought was green yarn and getting a bright blue, and that wasn't the only such case.) Still, I know very well from my own experience that photographing yarn isn't always the easiest thing, and I can't count how many photos of my knitting I've uploaded with caveats that essentially go "it's not really that colour - in fact it's a lot more like X, but my camera..." and so on. So I'm prepared to be quite understanding if the people who are selling me the yarn are having trouble getting a good photo.

So far, so good. But, fairly recently, they started doing this thing that spooked me a little. I'd click on a product in one of their e-mails, have a look at it, decide not to buy it after all, and get on with my day. Then, maybe half an hour later, I'd get another e-mail with another link to the same product, and the subject line would be "Still thinking about it?", or even "We caught you looking!". I mean... yikes. (And, in answer to the first question, no. In no case was I ever still thinking about it. I'm not an indecisive person. If I'd wanted to buy whatever it was, I would have done so on the spot.) Not only that, but they'd even do this if I'd clicked on something that I already owned just so that I could link it here (they did that with the knitted wrap scarf thing that I talked about in an earlier post). So I'd delete that, and then a bit later on I'd get yet another e-mail with the same link, and this time the subject line would be "You left your next project behind!"

Nope. No, really, I didn't. My next project is just over there, in fact [points at stack of vegan sock yarn]. So, after this had happened maybe two or three times, I e-mailed them and asked them very nicely if they would please stop doing it because it is as creepy as all get out.

I'm just going to digress a little here and say that I have absolutely no objection to websites tracking people for analytics purposes. Full disclosure: I do it myself. I'm tracking you, and if you don't like that I'm going to tell you right now how to stop me doing it. You go and get yourself a DuckDuckGo e-mail address, and change your e-mail on this site (and any others - most websites will be tracking you a lot more than I am) to that address. But the difference is I'm not doing anything creepy with that tracking, nor am I ever going to. All I'm looking at is how many people open the e-mails, and that in turn gives me helpful feedback about which titles are going to appeal to people and which aren't. So, for instance, nobody at all opened the e-mail with the word "maths" in the title (it was about hyperbolic crochet, in fact!), and from that I know not to use that word in any more titles. Also, "Triskaidekaphilia", which was about the code wheel, wasn't very popular, and so I thought... OK, don't use long and unfamiliar-looking words in titles. So you are very welcome to opt out of my tracking if it bothers you, but all I'm using it for is to try to ensure you're getting something you actually want to read. And, naturally, I don't have any problem at all with people tracking me for the same kind of reason.

Anyway, to return to LoveCrafts: they sent me a boilerplate response telling me how much they valued my privacy, and I thought "horsefeathers", and proceeded to take matters into my own hands. I changed my e-mail address on their site to a DuckDuckGo address (what that does, by the way, is simply to strip out all the trackers it can find and then forward the e-mail to an address of your choosing), and then, the next time I felt like opening a link in one of their e-mails, I opened it in a private browsing window. I should also mention that I'm already running Firefox with the Privacy Badger extension. So, you know, you would have thought all that would have worked.

Sadly, it didn't. I clicked an e-mail link to some interesting-looking yarn - which, incidentally, was completely out of stock in all shades, so I have no idea why they linked it in their e-mail in the first place - and, private browsing window and all other precautions notwithstanding, I still got that blamed e-mail half an hour later asking me if I was "still thinking about it?". And then, maybe another half an hour after that, "You've left your next project behind!"

So I have e-mailed them again, and this time I've informed them, politely but very firmly, that if it doesn't stop I am going to have nothing further to do with them and take my custom elsewhere. I didn't feel the need to remind them that my custom has been pretty extensive over these last few years. They have all the records. And, you know what? They are the only site I have ever had this problem with. A lot of commercial sites are a bit pushy, but this is taking pushy to unprecedented extremes. This isn't just the shop assistant continually hovering over you asking if they can help. This is the shop assistant running down the road after you once you've left the shop, waving a ball of yarn in each hand and yelling at you at the top of their voice that you forgot to buy it.

I don't think they will stop, not unless enough other people complain (surely I'm not the only person who is freaked out by this behaviour?). I'm therefore investigating other sources. There is, of course, always eBay, though that is generally best if you already know the specific yarn you want. There's The Knitting Network, which is not a bad site; the only problem with them is that their e-mails are a bit disorganised. You think you're clicking on a link to a particular product, but in fact the e-mail is showing only one image with maybe five products in it and one link to a general page, so then you have to find the product that interests you from there, which means it's a good idea to make a quick mental note of what it's called before you click. On the plus side, they do Emu yarns, which are excellent value (I like the ones I've tried a lot better than Paintbox, which is LoveCrafts' speciality; they tend to be softer). And only the other day I found The Wool Box. I haven't yet had an e-mail from them, so I don't know how good those are, but they seem to have a good range, they've recently started doing Emu, and... they had a yarn I particularly wanted that LoveCrafts don't happen to stock.

Anyway, they have just replied to me. This time it was more helpful; rather than simply a standard boilerplate response, they said I could go to the cookie settings on their site and refuse some of the cookies. However, they didn't say which, and if you go and look at those cookie settings, you'll find a warning to say that because they value your privacy so much you can opt to refuse all but the strictly essential cookies... but, of course, if you do that, then the site may not work properly. Whoop de doo. So, when you boil it down, they're still telling me that the default is the shop assistant chasing me down the street yelling that I've forgotten to buy the yarn, and if I don't want that a) I have to opt out, and b) they'll do their best to discourage me from doing that. (I shall leave aside the semantic issue of what exactly they mean by "the site working properly" and from whose point of view. I actually suspect it will be perfectly fine if I decline every single cookie that isn't strictly necessary for the site to function. It doesn't matter. I don't like their attitude.)

We shall see how things pan out. But I strongly suspect that if any of my friends ends up with a knitted Cthulhu, it'll be all Lovecraft and no LoveCrafts.