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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the newsletter business (and don't use these modals out of principle) and the folks I chat to about it confirm the same - they work really well.

But, I counter, so does spamming or making 10000s of automated phone calls.. and we've agreed those things are damaging and unethical - I agree with Dave, it's about time we as an industry considered full screen modals to be dirty and unwelcome.

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Thanks for Node Weekly - that email plus a daily listserv archive of a local tech group are the only two emails I always read when they show up in my inbox.

It's about all user intent. Will you bring value? For you I'd advice experimenting with a pop-up when the user is about to leave. "A popup designed with exit-intent – in laymans terms it means that the popup only displays when you are about to leave the site." Results? "an increase of sign-ups by 600%. They went from typically 70-80 daily new subscribers to 445 – 470 new subs per day."

How would you go about detecting when a user is about to leave your site? Other than responding to a click on an external link? The two ways I typically leave a site are a) typing a URL into the address bar and b) closing a tab.

Well, if the user is like me then having just put up a big content-obscuring popup is an excellent sign that the user is about to leave.

Thanks for the answers, everyone. I was mostly curious to see if the technique was to pause the page unload or something when the user tried to go to a different site (a dark pattern, IMO). I don't personally object to the cursor location and page scrolling techniques mentioned here.

Watch for the mouse along the upper 10px of the window [0] or use of the [Ctrl] key (for Ctrl+L or Ctrl+W). Or as other said, for a threshold of upper/upper-left mouse movement.

You'll get a few false flags from people trying to Ctrl+C but so many people use the right-click context menu to copy/paste...you can probably ignore Ctrl+_ entirely and just focus on that window near the top. Most users will pass by that area when going to:

    1) Change to another tab
    2) Close the tab
    3) Type a new search/website in the Omnibar

[0] http://i.imgur.com/ihiAcHe.png

That's really irritating because you get false positives (not "false flag", that's something else entirely) whenever you go to change tabs with the mouse.

If somebody is interested in subscribing, then a subscribe box at the bottom or side of the content is fine.

Ah, too late to fix my mistake now. Just a little slip. :) Thanks for the correction. I know the difference of course, just had the wrong thing in my mind while typing!

>whenever you go to change tabs with the mouse.

Only fire the event once, as most people will be leaving. Not flipping between tabs.

>If somebody is interested in subscribing, then a subscribe box at the bottom or side of the content is fine.

Research and A/B tests say otherwise. I was sharing a popular method - I don't use it myself. I don't agree with it and I don't browse sites that make use of the annoying pop-up modals.

But the trade off of driving away some users to capture many more is one many people and companies would make.

Most people move to the left and up ;-) (Basically to the back button). See: http://optinmonster.com/how-it-works/ (WARNING: POP-UP! Ha ha

Scrolling up seems pretty popular. Why wouldn't you want a half-page menu telling you what to read next when you scroll up to check something?

Why would you? You're not scrolling up to get recommendations, you're scrolling up to re-read content.

Or at least, that's me. If I want to go back to navigation, I hit the Home key (the vast majority of systems do have one or two of them...). If I'm scrolling up, it's to read.

It's typically done when the user's mouse leaves the page.

onbeforeunload might get you there, but any site that uses that for any reason other than making sure I don't lose any unsaved changes is the devil.

If it comes up on exit-intent and doesn't steal focus, they don't seem that bad. An issue is that the triggering is worse on mobile and can be flaky if you're an advanced user (aka like you are on HN and you Ctrl+Click a bunch of links to open in new tabs and then read them in a batch) - those sort of behaviors can trip the exit intent prematurely.

The way I feel about it, if this is the compromise we've settled on, between users and marketers, I'm OK with it.

I'd much rather close an email-gathering overlay once on a new site, than get inundated with spam or junk calls.

(I say this as both a user and a marketer.)

Eh, in my experience spamming performs really poorly.

Whats the solution then? SEO crawlers to heavily penalise them?

Apparently Google already is for mobile contexts: http://searchengineland.com/interstitialgeddon-google-warns-...

>But, I counter, so does spamming or making 10000s of automated phone calls.

Spamming and automated phone calls are unsolicited. These popups are not. You are the one in control. You can avoid popups by not going to those sites.

That's not possible the first time I follow a link to a new site though.

I avoid sites like Forbes because of their weird splash pages but if it's something new what can you do apart from not return?

>but if it's something new what can you do apart from not return?

Not returning is what you can do.

I'm not saying it's not annoying. I'm saying lumping it with telemarketing is different. Telemarketing is annoying even when you do nothing. Whereas with these popups, if you do nothing, you will not get the popups.

The popups are not invading your space. You are going to their space.

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