The mods have nothing to do with Future so I am working with what little sway that I might have
collected over the years.
Please be patient.
This may seem like a tiny event in the grand scheme of things, but I consider it a turning point for the community. I understand your experience says patience and polite discourse have the best chance to fix it, but experience also teaches us this kind of behavior has deeper roots and will escalate. For now the community's reaction is to accommodate to this new reality with a crash course on cognitive dissonance:
allisolm said:
The newsletter is not spam. It is sent by the people who own both the site and its internal communication system. If you wish to unsubscribe from it, do so
here.
administrator allisolm
Just because I can jump through a hoop to
maybe unsubscribe does not make it anything but SPAM.
For the first time since I joined this forum I decided to look into the privacy terms to find out Future is UK / EEA based and quite close to GDPR influence. This means unsolicited & repeated communication is not a good idea at all, at least for EU based users. The user consent form is also lacking some mandatory GDPR options. I still can't believe I would have to spend this much energy to mitigate such a stupid little thing, but I guess the asymmetry is what allowed this animated GIF pinata to be born in the first place.
If Future wants this engagement drive private messaging NotSpam™ to continue, do it properly with automated systems, proper privacy consent, opt-in and unsubscribe mechanics. Or don't do it at all.