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What? This feature enables people to subscribe to get notifications if people reply to their comment, if people reply to the article they’ve commented on, or even just to subscribe if they’ve an interest in following the discussion and don’t want to comment. One needn’t even comment to subscribe.
Why? To inform people, to keep people interested, to enable them to know if someone has replied to their comment without having to return to the site to see. Basically, to make it easier to have a community as I’m pretty sure the ability to realistically converse is required for communication and I’m pretty sure communication and community go together like peanut butter and banana.
Where? You’ll see the various options at the end of all article, before the comment submit button. There’s a drop-down method and a link that will enable you to subscribe without actually commenting.
How? This is pretty self-explanatory. The options are pretty clear and I have stuck with the default wording because I’m unable to think of anything more clear.
The system uses a double opt-in. This means you have to actually check your email (possibly junk mail) to confirm that you did, indeed, subscribe. This is because we’re good Netizins and we aren’t going to be legitimately accused of spam – ever. I have a zero tolerance policy with regards to spam (and so doesn’t our hosting company).
This means that you can’t just insert any ol’ email address and expect it to do much. This means you have to use your own email address.
Of course, subscribing to notifications is not mandatory. You don’t have to do it, but the system defaults to it being enabled.
It also does some security things that aren’t dreadfully important, but they’ll ensure that the system only sends the appropriate emails from the appropriate domain.
Additionally, and of course, your email addresses are never shared with anyone else. They are not sold, they are not given away, they are not ever seen by anyone other than the administration. I don’t even think @COF can see them, though I trust him implicitly to treat them with the respect I do.
If it’s not made painfully obvious by my emphasis, I treat my obligations to protect your personal information very seriously. The goal for the site, monetarily, is to break even and pay for itself. It’s not to make a profit. Thus, I have zero interest in exchanging your private data with other people. Your email addresses never leave this site in any format other than encrypted backups. Any passwords are never stored – but are salted and hashed and then that value is stored. I can never see your passwords, even if I wanted to. All I can do is reset them.
What you can do? Test! I’ve a limited amount of time. I give all the new features a quick test, but I can’t discover all the possible scenarios and I don’t have time to ensure everything is working 100%. I believe they are – but I’m not positive. So, please take a few minutes to try the features. The appropriate URLs should generate themselves dynamically and with unique tokens, so that they work for you and only you. Emails should appear in your inbox (possibly filtered by your email provider into junk/spam because we’re still a new domain) within just a few minutes. They should absolutely be there within 15 minutes.
So, try some features out. If you want, use a private browsing session and make a few comment replies to yourself or to articles you’re not subscribed to. That sort of thing.
If you notice a bug, let us know. We’ll maybe be able to fix it in a timely manner. If it’s not something I can fix, there’s a channel to report it up-stream and people more adept will fix it for us.
Addendum: I’m just the admin. I format stuff for publication but, in an ideal world, even that task will end up in the hands of the community. We’ll see where time and progress takes us. Either way, my job is administration. That’s it.
I push buttons, set settings, configure features, keep the site running, keep things up-to-date, keep things as secure as possible, and deal with things that impact what you see and how you see them. I’m basically a knob twister.
The site really belongs to you. We actually get a pretty impressive amount of traffic and community participation is rather impressive considering our age. I’ll take a moment to give a shoutout to @65n85tunes for being both active and knowledgeable. I do not do that. All I do is push the buttons and try to keep the magic smoke from escaping.
In my goal of doing my job responsibly, I try to be transparent and disclose what I’m doing. I keep changing the format of my notifications, because I’m trying to find something that fits and is appropriate. I’ve gone from conversational to something a bit more formal.
As the site belongs to you, and my responsibility is to you, then I think it’s my job to inform folks about what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and what the expected results are going to be.
If y’all don’t actually want to know this stuff, do let me know! It’d save me some time. If you want to know more about what I’m doing, do let me know. I’m happy to explain it and my role is not too dissimilar to being your employee. I work for you, at least to some extent.
Other than that, enjoy your weekend! I have a few free hours this afternoon and will be tinkering and poking buttons. I hope you’re all doing something you enjoy, as I certainly enjoy this.
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