My apologies for hitting you all with two topics on the same day (especially when so many of you are already feeling overwhelmed by emails!), but I wanted to address some of the more pressing and common technical issues people are having and to ask for your feedback on an important site question.

Technical/Web Support Issues

• Issues emailing to coordinate@. A number of people have told us they can’t reply to the mailing list. What we’ve found in most cases is that this is due to people attempting to email the list from an email address not associated with their account. This is an understandable confusion, particularly if you have multiple email accounts that you read through clients like Microsoft Outlook or you have mail aliases. Therefore, if you are experiencing this issue, please visit your account page to be sure to which email address your subscription belongs. To do this, see our FAQ here. Whenever you email or respond to coordinate@, please be sure you are sending from the right address. If you are still experiencing issues, however, let us know.
• Changing Mailing List Subscription. If you would like to change how often you are receiving emails from the mailing list, please see detailed instructions here.
• Cleaning Up Forum Threads. We understand that one of the draw backs of the mailing list is that the entire discussion thread gets reposted on the web site with each individual reply. This can make the forums extremely long and cumbersome to read. We are looking into developing a way to minimize these. But in the meantime, I’m sure everyone else would really appreciate it if you took the time to delete the existing thread from your email when you reply.
• Log in Issues. A couple of you have expressed issues when you log in, specifically that you are asked to create a new password each time you visit the site. Our technical team is looking at this issue as we speak (I won’t bore you with the technical acrobatics involved).
• Other technical/web support issues. We’ve set up a specific email address for all technical issues or web support questions: websupport at relocalize dot net. Please feel free to email us at this address if you encounter any issues or need assistance. Emailing to this address will help us respond more quickly.

Forum Privacy

We’ve received a number of questions and complaints about privacy in group forums. Without belaboring the point, there are is no perfect solution in establishing privacy rules for groups: Making groups more private makes it more difficult and thus less likely for new members to join. Making groups less private makes it more difficult for members to speak candidly, thus making it more challenging to share information and make members feel confident they are in a trusted space.

Based on all the input we’ve received, we’d like to recommend that we make all group forums private from now on. This would allow groups to maintain an area that they could be sure was private and secure for their members (we are working right now to make sure that the “Recent Comments” box on the homepage does not include comments from private forums), while still having the ability to make other areas (events, blogs, news, etc) public.

But before taking any steps, we’d like to hear from you. Do you wish to keep your group’s forums public?

Thanks,

Asher