AMC: The See-Quel — Or, How I Fcked Up the Website

And Hmmmm....I Wonder How That Possibly Could Have Been Avoided

I am here on this Earth preternaturally ready to admit my imperfections, foibles, and other failings as a human being. And when I screw something up, I’m the first to take ownership of that screw up. And in my last post, concerning the complicacies of accessing the notice documents in the AMC settlement, I fcked something up.

In attempting to access the notice documents, I typed in the website from the postcard wrong, and it lead to one of the paths of the postcard weirdness that I explained being inaccurate — or at least, accurate to my experience of fcking it up but inaccurate as to the contents of the postcard. I completely own this, so let me fully explain.

When I was typing in this (somewhat unnecessarily complicated website address, but maybe now I’m being defensive) from the postcard, I typed in a period instead of a backslash between “newsroom” and “default". Let me blow up the text for you, because it’s quite small. Here’s how it appears vs. how I typed it.

You could — perhaps — imagine that I’m not the only person who could have such a problem with a website address that isn’t exactly intuitive. And g-d forbid, don’t include the period that is actually supposed to be the end of the sentence, because that actually will cause you to get the Page Not Found page that is shown below, for real for real, not just because I mistyped something in the middle of the web address.

The thing is, I’m not sure how this cuts, because if you remember the rest of that part of my post, this “Page not found” page is actually the page that made it the easiest to find the documents that one is actually looking for — if you could get past the fact that it says “Page not found” at the top. In fact, fcking up that backslash for a period was the only way I personally ever managed to finally see that weird link in the “Contact Information” section that’s not really a link at all to the page that it says it links to, but is actually a link to the page of documents that one needs to navigate to, in order to get to the documents that one needs to find to meaningfully educate one’s self about the settlement. If I hadn’t screwed up the data entry, I’m not sure I would have ever found where the documents lived on AMC’s website, so … bully for me, I guess?

If you go to the actual page on the postcard, not being a typo-prone derp like me, but perhaps even being a better person than I am, or if you actually get the magnifying glass out that I gave to the cute little monkeys in my previous post and also if you manage not to type the period at the end of the sentence into the web address even though it ends in “aspx” which is not really a thing that most normal websites end in for normal people — so, presuming you are sufficiently web savvy and Extremely Online™️ enough like me but also not derpy or fat-fingered (you’ve got to really thread the needle here), and you manage to get all the way to the proper page in a way that a person with years of graduate study, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Ivy League education and even some pandemic-related coding proficiency, who spends her entire fcking waking life on the internet couldn’t quite manage to do … you know … then, this is where you get.

The thing is that I’m an extremely online person who has spent almost two decades in law (yikes!). Now that I’ve been staring at this website for a few days, I do see that under Presentations, the documents are there. Were they always there? Fck if I know. Why are they under Presentations? What does that even mean? I know I didn’t see them the first twenty times I navigated by them if they were there. They are also in that other place under the fake-out link under Stockholder Litigation Information. I know I didn’t see the Stockholder Litigation Information thing the first ten times I scrolled to the quasi-footer, even though it sticks out to me like a sore thumb now, and even though it wasn’t really a real website yesterday when I checked on it.

I thought to myself last night in that liminal space between waking and sleep: “Chance, you really should have screenshotted the fact that the www.stockholderlitigationinfo.com website wasn’t a real website and just redirected to a broken webpage, because you know some company man is going to gaslight you in the morning, register the website and redirect it to a page with the litigation documents on it, and say “oh, sweetie, you must have mistyped the website or something, do you have any proof it wasn’t working, because it definitely was!”

Well, I wasn’t smart or suspicious enough to screenshot the fact that it was a broken website yesterday, but this morning, I decided to see what was going on with it, and doncha know, the situation has changed! It no longer just goes to a broken webpage where Safari tells me to fck straight off, it goes to a page that has been registered with Namecheap! And look when it was registered!

What a coinkidink! Let’s assume the best and that the error was discovered and is being corrected, just the same as the spirit of this post. Because that’s what good humans do when they make mistakes. They see them, they admit them, and they correct them. We can all do better by being like that.

Speaking of being good humans, I wanted to give a shout-out to some of the lawyers on the case, who provide an excellent example of how to do great notice when pointing to a top-level domain, because there are several TLDs listed on the postcard in addition to AMCs complicated web address, and one of them really shines with respect to the ease of finding the documents therein, and I think they deserve to be called out for it. (I am still not sure why there is this practice of pointing to top-level domains in the first place, and not just pointing to a dedicated website for the purposes of this litigation with an easily human-readable and human-typable and not-typo-prone address, but it looks like we might be moving ever-so-slowly in that direction, so that’s good, I guess.) Anyway, the very last line of the postcard provides a link to fksfirm.com, and it only took my eyes about eight seconds to figure out where to click to find exactly where to go to find the documents from there. Bold, clear text, in the main menu, easy to understand, uncluttered. Bravo!

In fact, FKS provides a link to another document that I failed to provide to you in my links yesterday because it isn’t in AMC’s set. I’ll be discussing it in this weekend’s post, but to make sure it’s pre-paywall and easily accessible, here is the Scheduling Order as entered by the Court. And so that everything is in one place, here’s a relist of all the other documents you might want for the case from yesterday’s post as well:

Notice of Pendency of Stockholder Class Action and Proposed Settlement

Letter to Stockholders from the Court (revised)

In-Person Appearance Form (Must be Received by May 31, 2023)

Plaintiffs’ Opening Brief in Support of the Settlement

Defendant’s Opening Brief in Support of the Settlement

Stipulation and Agreement of Compromise, Settlement and Release

Unredacted Operative Complaint

Here’s to always being better.

Much love, Chance