from the redo! dept
On Tuesday, I wrote about how we were upgrading our daily email newsletter—the one we’ve had for decades but never actually promoted. Thousands of you had signed up just by spotting the little email icon. We figured more might be interested if we actually talked about it. We’d upgraded the tech, written a whole post about it, and figured people would start signing up.
And then… crickets. For two days straight, the only “new” signup was a test I’d run with my own email address. Which was, you know, not ideal. It was possible that no more people wanted to sign up and we’d maxed out on subscribers already. But… that seemed unlikely.
Then we got a few reports from people saying they tried to sign up but got error messages. Which is, generally speaking, not what you want.
It turns out that we had a little bug: users who were signed into their Techdirt account could sign up for the newsletter. But if you were signed out (as most readers are) well… you got the error. There’s some sort of QA lesson in that, and yes, we should have tested it logged out as well, but there’s always something you miss.
All that is to say, we’ve now fixed this, and ever since we did, the signups have been flowing in. So I thought I’d do another quick post and say that, no, really, you can sign up for the emailed daily newsletter if you want it!
Also worth noting: a bunch of people said they prefer RSS or just visiting the site directly, and that’s great too. We’ve had full-text RSS feeds for over two decades—long before most sites even understood what they were—and the site itself is always there. The point isn’t to force you into one distribution channel. If anything, we’re doing the opposite: giving you the option to consume Techdirt however you actually want to, rather than locking you into whatever method happens to be most fashionable… or profitable. That’s increasingly rare, and it’s not an accident.
We just want you to be able to enjoy Techdirt whichever way works best for you.
Filed Under: email, newsletter, techdirt
Companies: techdirt
