First, here is the shortcut to your email settings
https://permies.com/forums/email/preference
For the moment, I wanna point out the monthlyish signup. It says
hand crafted update of the most important things happening in the last month ... or two ... whenever we think of sending it out.
Paul says that people that are part of our community enjoy getting this email once a month, and people that just use (or abuse) our community don't like getting this email once a month. Click here to read more about Paul's Choice. Click here to close your account which will stop the monthly email.
And I am the Paul that said that.
Further, once in a while we get a message from somebody insisting that we stop sending any emails. We have found that the best way to be sure of that is to lock the account. You get no emails, and you cannot post, and you cannot access private forums or content that requires a login. But you don't get any emails either (pretty sure about that - but could be mistaken).
The problem is that everybody who says "don't send me any emails" nearly always means that they want to receive an email about their account, or being given access to something, or if somebody replied to a thread they are watching. So what they really want is to receive the emails they want to receive and not receive the emails they don't want to receive. So when we lock their account, that's when we get an email with these details.
We offer the option for people to close their account. I think this shuts down just as much emails as if your account is locked, but I'm not sure about that. But you can reopen your account whenever you want. I have heard that there are some people that will reopen their account, write a post, and then close their account again. Weird.
This site is a massively rich system. There is a ton of stuff going on here. And email stuff is at the core of it. At the same time, we are operating on a shoe string with an all-volunteer staff. I think we do a really fucking awesome job for free. And as the years pass, we do manage to get a few changes to our software. Nearly everybody is cool with how it all works. And a few people think it is so close to what they want that all they need to do is suggest "the right way" and then it will be perfect. Usually this suggestion is wrapped in a rather intense package of hostility, but we can wade through that to see the suggestion. Suggestions about email tend to be that the software has to be changed to accommodate what that individual wants - regardless of whether it works for us or anybody else. So we've kinda gotten used to tuning that out - just throw it on the top of the mountain of other email "suggestions."
Now we have a fancy thread to talk about all this stuff. I think that if a person really understands what we have and why it is this way, then they might come up with some really good ideas for our future. Feel free to post your ideas here and we can talk about it. Keep in mind, that a really great idea might take a few years until we can get it implemented. So please be patient.
The grand summary is: we offer lots of fiddly. And we offer the ability to close your account (turns off nearly everything, but you can no longer post. but you can turn it back on when you like). And we can lock your account (turns off nearly everything, but you cannot unlock).
I'm sure it is far from perfect by the standards of anybody. At the same time, I think it is far superior to nearly all other sites. But the best thing is that we now have this thread so we can talk about all of it.
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