Introducing the Boards Digest & Email Preferences Update

Hello all,

So we've got a new feature we're going to be rolling out soon that we're calling the Boards.ie Digest. We might find something more interesting to call it before it's pushed live properly, but basically, the idea is that we will send a email to you, no more than once a week with some interesting content from around the site that you may or may not have seen. It will be opt-in for all existing members, so you wont' be getting it by default, but we're going to enable it for all new members to try and show off some other parts of the site and thus get more people joining in on more discussions. Several other platforms use this with great effect - I always find myself clicking at least one article on the digests Quora send for example. We don't have the format of it finalised just yet, but it's coming, so when I have a sample for you, I'll post it here.

Whilst we were doing that, we made some changes around the "how can Boards contact you" part of the User Control Panel which I'd like to tell you about too.



First of all, we changed the ambiguous "Receive Email from Administrators" tick-box as the title of Administrator meant "site owner" in VBulletin and that hasn't been how we describe things for a long time. Instead it says "Receive Email from Boards.ie." The functionality is the same as before - it's tied to a part of the VBulletin platform that allows us to send you an email from the back end of the site, but it's a function we have, to my knowledge, never used. Still, we didn't want to simply remove it because some of you have it set to yes, and some no.

You'll then see the Friendship Requests tick box as before - no change there.

Then we have the Boards.ie Digest which is the new feature I mentioned above. Again, it's opt-in for existing members, but it'll be enabled by default for new sign-ups.

Finally we have "Third Party Email." Now, this does not mean we are going to start selling email addresses for spammers or anything of the sort! We have however had numerous enquiries from people about wanting to make offers or get help from our member base in a manner that doesn't piss people off. This is and will always be something you have to opt-in for - no one wants to be sent any more email than they already are and we will *NEVER* be giving anyone your email address - we'll manage all communications ourselves on behalf of anyone who is interested. The sorts of things we might include would be Surveys, Discounts and/or offers for Boardsies etc. This will be a commercial opportunity for us - I'm not going to try and pretend it isn't but I promise you that we won't have anything that we wouldn't be happy to get ourselves. And again, I stress, it is 100% opt-in.

So like I said above, the format of the Digest (and even the name!) is still being finalised, but the technical work has been completed and the team want to push the updates out to the site rather than leaving them waiting. I'll get a sample for you as soon as I can so you can decide for yourself if you want to opt-in or not.