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Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

Without commenting on whether it's a good feature or not, this morning I had the pop-up ad for this new feature displayed in my Fastmail web page. However, it was positioned on the screen so that the "Got It" link at the bottom was obscured, and the pop-up captured all clicks. I could move the mouse all over the place, things highlighted and unhighlighted, but the only thing actually clickable (Got It) was off the screen. And the ad said something about paying my utility bill online, which I don't have setup, so I thought I had some kind of virus locking up my email account.

I really didn't appreciate this at all, and that's being diplomatic about it.

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I was momentarily confused as well. Not a feature I ever thought about before, and will probably never use.

I'd rather have them implement something simplier like having an anniversary field for contacts and that show up in my calendar so I know when to mail anniversary cards.

In regards to some of the other replies:

While birthdays are technically anniversaries; I've never met anyone who calls a birthday, an anniversary.

Birthdays ≠ Anniversaries. Just like Squares ≠ Rectangles. (All birthdays are anniversaries, but not all anniversaries are birthdays; just like all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.)

I'd rather use the birthday field for birthdays. So when I say (and I imagine 99.999% of other Americans say) "anniversary" we mean everything other than birthdays (most commonly: wedding anniversaries).

Birthdays are called anniversaries (anniversaire) in French.

You made me check but there is a "birthday" field on the contact form and I can display a "Birthdays" calendar with events for the birthdays of my contacts.

For other types of anniversaries (like close friends' and relatives' wedding anniversaries) I sometimes create dummy contacts.

I just create an all-day calendar event and manually change the date each year.

Can you not just make it a yearly repeating event?

Fastmail has a birthday field that shows up in the calendar. I know because I use it :)

Similar experience. Thankfully, the link was not obscured in my case. However, I did not appreciate that it blocked every click even after quite a bit of time had passed.

In my case, this happened just as I had opened a utility bill. First instinct: fastmail scanned my inbox and I had made a mistake paying for a 5 year subscription extension earlier this year.

it's kind of ironic they would push a pop-over promotion for something they could have just sent as an email

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