Subscribe? No, thank you. Go away please!

In Japan where I used to live, from time to time a newspaper agent will knock on your door in the afternoon to sell you subscriptions. In Malaysia where I live right now we don't have that, but pretty soon maybe it will too as less and less people are buying from the stands because they can already read it online. But what I want to focus here is the experience of having someone appear in front of your door as you open it to answer the doorbell, only to be begged for subscription. Haven't you experienced something similar on the net?

Some sites offer you subscription to their contents. They want to mail you with daily tips, news, etc. And they do it in the same manner as the above mentioned subscription agent: in your face. They usually come out in a form of a dialog box, which won't go away until you click the close button, usually denoted by a x-cross. And if you don't make it go away, you can't browse the page/site because interaction with anything else is disabled. But if you close the dialog, chances are it will no longer appear when you revisit the site, because it's marked by the cookie.

Now the problem is cookie is kept per browser. You don't get to make every browser your own. As soon as you move to someone else's PC, you will be stuck with that PC's browser's settings. Along with its saved cookies. Even if you've already closed the subscription dialog on the browser on your PC, you may still see it again when you use someone else's PC. Heck, even on your same PC, you may likely see it again if you happen to use another browser (I use up to 4 different browsers, hence 4 times the fun).

If it wasn't for the valuable information that site was giving, I wouldn't even have bothered looking at that site. So webmasters, here's one tip: even if you want to ask for subscription, don't be intrusive. Especially since the subscription itself is optional. Learn from Stack Overflow (or any StackExchange sites) on to do a non-intrusive modeless dialog.