User blog:Meighan/You've Got Founder Mail

Have you noticed new emails in your inbox lately from Wikia? If you’re a founder you have! You’re receiving newly redesigned founder emails that were recently rolled out for the English community (international wikis will have them soon too). Below I walk you through the what, the why and the how of the new features surrounding these emails. We hope you will be as excited as we are about them.

What we did:

 * We redesigned the emails with HTML.
 * We switched to local (each wiki you own) preferences as opposed to global (across the site).
 * Instead of one preference to control all of the founder emails, there are now multiple preferences.
 * Just like our older emails we still let you know who has joined and who has edited your wiki -- but we have also added a new email that let’s you know how many people viewed your wiki. Awesome, right?
 * We offer a digest email that gives you a quick rundown: who’s joined, who’s edited and who’s viewed your wiki. This comes as one email at the end of each day.
 * We added more information like the name of the wiki, usernames, page names and more.
 * When someone joins your wiki, we link you right to the user’s talk page within the email.

Why we did it:

 * By adding HTML it gives a clearer (and we think colorful, too) new look that’s inviting and awesome!
 * By making the preferences local instead of global you have more control over what emails you receive and how many you get from each wiki you have founded.
 * We split the preferences for those who might want to see only who joins, or only who edits, but not both. By splitting the preferences you can keep getting the emails you want, and stop getting the emails you don’t.
 * Adding the views email gives you a deeper understanding of the activity on your wiki.
 * By offering the digest email preference, we’ve cut way back on the number of emails you receive and put all of the available info into one daily email. Neat!
 * Having more information in these emails helps you keep track of who’s on your wiki and who’s doing what. This way you can see what activity is happening and where.
 * Linking you to new users that have joined your wiki gives you an easy way to reach out and say hello!

How to use:
In your ‘Preferences’ scroll down to the very bottom to ‘Wiki Email Options’. You can choose all three options: ‘joins, edits, views’ or you can tick the ‘daily digest’ to get that info in one email, once a day. When you have decided what you want to go with click ‘save’ (you can always change again later). Remember these are local preferences, so you will have to go to each wiki you have founded and edit your preferences.





Our goals are to offer you more useful emails, with more information, more control and insight into the activity around your wikis. We hope this new feature makes your founder experience easier and more productive here at Wikia.

Do you have questions about the new emails or the preferences? Do you have feedback about your experience with them? Or do you just want to say thanks for making email preferences a little easier and prettier? Leave a comment below.