Pretty, and broken.

Optin Cat is easy to use, and visually appealing. BUT, I’ve encountered a couple of fatal bugs which have been in the code for at least a year and have not been fixed. The first was that for some unknown reason the popup stopped working, and would send people to the url + “/#” which would send them to a 404, and not add their name to the list. This was annoying and difficult to diagnose, and in the end I got it working again. Great. BUT THEN it broke again shortly after, this time because I didn’t want to show the “name” field in a form. What happened? Optin cat pretended to work, but didn’t. On the back end, it passes an EMPTY NAME FIELD (https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/popup-not-working-14?replies=7) and seems to work, but doesn’t. The list it’s trying to pass it to has the name field removed, so mailchimp just chucks the request. It took someone commenting on facebook for me to realize that it was telling people to “check their email” for the confirmation which was NEVER SENT. In other words, it broke and didn’t tell anyone, just pretended it was all fine… all while I’m in the middle of a book launch and frustrating dozens of people who were trying to subscribe. Completely unacceptable; I will not be back.