We're only trying to help

One of my pet hates is the website with no clear route for feedback. About once a day I find some irritating or downright broken "feature" of a website, whether it's the incessant "We'd like you to complete a quick survey" popups, or the complete failure to provide a clear process for reporting broken links (the best case being a major media company whose "report a broken link" link was itself broken when I tried it).

There is seldom a clear route for reporting such problems, and even if you find a way, a response is the exception rather than the rule. This should be a concern for site owners as well as intolerant users such as myself. If you don't make it easy for visitors to your site to report problems, you're removing a huge group of unpaid testers who would otherwise improve the quality of the site.

It's not just websites either. It seems increasingly rare these days to find a site that accepts mail to the "postmaster", yet this is a mandated requirement of the relevant RFC standard. Yes, I know it's a target for spammers, but there are plenty of good anti-spam solutions around.

Default addresses for reporting service abuse are also becoming hard to find, and when you do send mail to one, chances are all you'll get back is a form-letter reply. On occasion I've had to trace ownership of the host and call one of the directors; a real pain but an effective way of reorganising the IT department's "to do" list.