Bulk user invite to talk from the old mailing list

Space and infrastructure
1

When we moved from the mailing list to talk, >I< rushed the process and we lost a bunch of people. These people for whatever reason did not sign up for talk and stopped receiving emails.

Before we killed the mailing list. We sent out an email once a day for 5 days straight telling people to check out talk.vanhack.ca
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.hackerspaces.vhs.general/17277

If anyone tried to email the old list they would get an error message telling them that they should check out talk.vanhack.ca

Talk.vanhack.ca is heathly and growing. We have 189 registered users, of these users ~44 have been active (Created or replied to a topic) in the last week. in the last month we have had 1114 posts created. Thats better then the old mailing list.
https://talk.vanhack.ca/t/talk-stats-for-oct-2014/548

I have a list of all the old email address from the old system. the Discourse system has the ability to send build user invites out to a list of email address.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/sending-bulk-user-invites/16468

This is something I would like to do ONCE, to hopefully reclaim some of the lost members.

Suggestions, thoughts, comments?

2

How many people are on this list?

3

Some 400 people or so? (Can’t recall the number top of my head.)

On the other hand… Will this get us into trouble through CASL?
You’ll need to have some sort of opt-out arrangement for this list as well.

4

This list will be a one time thing of people that were previously on an opt-in list.

CASL would not apply.

1 Like
5

My mother sent an unsolicited email once.... Once.

I say go ahead and do it one time and clearly state "final notice"

1 Like
6

Our email lists are not soliciting commercial activity (we are not selling them anything), so CASL would not apply as well.

7

Hi,

I don’t think there is any dissent. We have nothing to lose.

Is this going to happen? Is there anything I can help with? Help construct a thorough email, maybe?

It should definitely have complete instructions on how to use Discourse like a mailing list.

8

Hi,

I think it’s a good idea to reach out to folks one final time.

The one suggestion I would have is to have a single “Subscribe” button on the invite. This button would set up the account based on the email to which you’re sending out the invite, and configure it to behave just like a mailing list.

Anything done to reduce barriers to entry and reconnect people to VHS helps.

1 Like
9

Tuesday Dec 9th, around 11pm.

Yes please, I have updated my topic with an example email.
Please make suggestions.

Every email from the discourse system has has instructions on how to reply to the system. Maybe a linked post would be better then adding it to the email.

Done

10

Could you make a new post with the email and make it a wiki?

11

Done

Closing this topic