You’ve undoubtedly received text messages seeking political donations or exhorting you to vote a certain way. Most conclude with Stop to End, Stop2End, Stop to Quit, and similar stock phrases to request removal from their list.

I always reply Stop because I can’t abide unsolicited solicitations. I’ve wished I could automate it.

Brad Greenlee, in March:

It took three of us to figure out Shortcuts' arcane UX, but we managed to automate “STOP to end"

The method is only for iOS; it uses a Shortcuts Automation to respond to messages containing one of the magic phrases, and, as Brad notes,

Setting it up is completely non-obvious.

An understatement. In fact, the important UI is completely hidden—first behind a long press, and then behind a second tap. Kudos to the three of them for discovering how to do this.

Fortunately, their walkthrough is easy enough to follow. The biggest hassle is that you must repeat it for each phrase, and for every device: You can’t duplicate an Automation, you can’t share them, and they don’t sync across devices.

(The second biggest hassle is that Shortcuts is buggy, at least on my main device. I can’t delete an Automation (FB14246121), and icons blink for no reason (FB142246569). Things work fine on a duplicate device, and in the betas.)

(Via Kris Arnold.)