John Gruber over at Daring Fireball awarded Tomtoc (“maker of laptop bags and sleeves”) his newly minted (and hardly coveted) title of “Dickover of the Week” for displaying a “subscribe to our mailing list” dickover on top of its “you’ve unsubscribed from our mailing list” confirmation page.
That is indeed pretty dickish, but I think I have a legitimate challenger to the title: The Locavore Guide, which features what might be the most ludicrous series of dickovers I’ve seen recently.
When you visit the site:
- Immediately on load, a large site logo covers the content.
- After a moment, an “Accept Cookies” dickover animates in, covering one-third of the width of a MacBook 13-inch Air (and the entire width of an iPhone 17 Pro) and obscuring almost completely the very content a visitor is there to read. (It is itself partially covered by the logo.)
- After another moment, a newsletter signup dickover covers the cookie dickover.
That’s three dickovers at once.
TheLocavoreDiskovers-Desktop.png
Alt: The Locavore Guide landing page, with a large oval logo on the upper left, which overlays a teal cookie dialog, and a yellow newsletter signup box overlaying the cookie dialog. Each obscures content; together, they obscure almost the entire page.
The logo shrinks on scroll and the newsletter signup can be dismissed, but that cookie dickover is perniciously persistent:
- The two “options” on the cookies banner are the Hobsonian “Accept Cookies” or “Learn more.”
- The “Learn more” option takes you to the site’s privacy page, which is almost completely obscured by the cookie dickover. (Also, every single link in the privacy document resolves to
<a href="/undefined">, leading to a treacly “Whoops! Wrong turn...” error page. Yep, also covered by the cookie dickover.)
This dickover remains on screen until you “accept” it. That’s a lot of dickery to swallow.
This site was shared with me by a friend, who asked:
Have you used any websites that have you choose between saying yes to their cookie policy and your tacit approval of said policy? (No opt out option.) I encountered two of those in the last few days. Seems very strong-army.
Yes, sadly—those “Accept and suck it” dialogs are everywhere, though I can’t recall one as glaringly user-hostile as this example.
My friend told me she “left the [Locavore] site even though I really wanted to use it”—which is the correct response—but considering the point of the site is to help readers “Discover over 14,000 independently owned businesses in all five boroughs” of New York, turning off a lifelong New Yorker who’s ready to explore is an abject failure of site design.