Allow groups.io messages to be more personal
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I recently started a group ( [email protected]) to send announcements about my gigs to interested parties. It's a "premium" group to which I've added a bunch of my friends. Several have?opted out because the canned welcome notice and a few other things make?the announcement group?look and sound so much like some kind of social-media or formal work-related site. I've been at pains to explain to some of my friends that neither the case, but I'd not have had to do this if the welcome message and other features could have been personalized.? The way I had been sending notices out was to simply send them from my personal email, adding the long list of recipients to the bcc: field each time. This is laborious and error prone, so I liked the idea of because of easy unsubscription and maintenance. Based on changes that Mark was able to make (see my recent postings to the beta group), I now have my group behaving the same way as my emails in most or all essentials; viz.: - Only moderators and owners can post new topics.
- Regular users can respond to posted topics.
- Responses made to posted topics go directly to the author of the post.
So what's missing? The personal touch! - Custom welcome message. I see that GMF has one, but I didn't see any way I could create my own. Is there a way I can do this for?my?group?
- The language in the canned Welcome message is offputting for a group such as mine. Language like "You have been added by the?Groups.io?Team to?Peter Shenkin Gigs."?has the air of officialese, especially since approximately nobody who gets the welcome based on my "direct adds" is likely to have ever heard of , and as soon as they read it they think it is spam.
- I would instead replace the whole message with something that I have written myself, as myself, using language like "I have added you to this mailing list thinking you might be interested", and so on. After all, it's really I, not , who was responsible for adding the user.
- Be able to get rid of the tag. For my group, it?is totally unneeded. My group already sends out email as from "Peter Shenkin Music", so the tag is redundant.?
- I tried setting the tag to an empty field in Settings, but this just restored?the default [peter-shenkin-gigs] tag. I replaced it with "Peter Shenkin Music: ", which is more user friendly, but still redundant, because that information is already in the From: of the email, which is immediately?visible to the user.
- I've looked at what other musicians do in their gig announcements. None of them include a tag in the Subject:. All of them have sufficient identification in the From: address to avoid confusion.
- This one could be solved by simply?allowing an empty tag field to do what it says: eliminate the tag!?
None of the suggestions I am making would be appropriate for all groups; I am a member of a group where I find the tag inoffensive, but that group is a discussion group and people understand from the start that some 3rd-party infrastructure is involved.
I would like to make my group look and feel as personal as the emails I used to send out, and IMO, there ought to be a way to do that.
If anyone has workarounds for replacing the entire Welcome message with a personalized one or for eliminating the tag, I'd appreciate it.
Thank you,
-P.?
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Peter S. Shenkin