Thanks for adding the opt-out feature! I’ll be writing an update post to inform my readers about this feature addition.

A quick note to let you know that the team pushed out an update earlier today that gives you the ability to opt-out of Community Messaging email. I’m sorry it took so long, we’ve been working on a ton of things lately and this was the soonest we could get it out there.

The setting is right there at the bottom of your Profile page.

For more details, see my post on the MyBlogLog blog:

http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/at-your-service.html

I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don’t have anything to say recently.

Bye

I left the community of blogs that have been in my feedreader for 6 months and I actively read, because I don’t want the emails from them.

At the same time I do want to be able to receive individual notifications from readers leaving a personal message.

I also want to be able to stay in touch with my subscribers, which started to become increasingly difficult once I hit a few 100.

I would have happily used MBL communities as a source of OPML, to feed services like Megite. In the end I am using Technorati after over 6 months of suggesting MBL introduce OPML for communities.

I stopped manually adding myself to communities actively at around 130. I have added a few more manually since then, but most have been automatic based on a few visits.

I am now up to 312 communities.

It makes my readers so happy when I drop by their blogs, and once I have been there a few times they love it when they see me joined to their community.

The autojoin feature is great for people who read your feeds and drop by to comment once in a while, and just forgot to join a community, however they certainly don’t want to be sent email because of it.

I am not a lawyer, but I believe all forms of commercial email has to be informed as such and I also believe there usually has to be a physical mailing address – that is certainly what is recommended by email marketers.

If someone subscribes to my comments, I even have that information in the emails sent out, because my blog is commercial, it has a few adverts and affiliate links, and the occasional paid review on a consultation basis.
Maybe I go a little beyond requirements, but I like being able to deliver my emails.

Most bloggers, and I include in that number most probloggers also have very little knowledge about email marketing rules.

If people are forced to turn off normal messaging because of this, it is one step forward and 2 steps back.

Before answering your questions, may I ask how many people are “approving” it? If the number of supporters is closer to the number of the people who are against it, I’m ready to link their post from my post. Maybe you saw highly lower amount of people supporting this feature over at MyBlogLog so you started to find publicity? ;) (no pun intended).

The fact is that *only a few* people have supported this feature and in my opinion, they are in the category of ‘exceptions’, nothing much. And about the screenshot, I’ve purposefully posted such a screenshot showing one message full of links (self promotion trick) and the other one who is clearly an innocent message.

If you don’t read many blogs, I suggest you to visit all the blogs where I’ve left comments about this feature explaining it clearly that I don’t want the complete removal of the feature. If people against this new messaging feature are demanding an opt out feature, why is it bothering you *a few supporters*?

And about the “real participation” in a community, I’ll like to say that you need to teach these type of lessons to a blogging beginner who might agree what you say because he will lack proper knowledge of blogging, community, social networking and related stuffs. People who are talking about “real participation” in a blogging community and then talking crap that “people join communities that they have no real interest in” are the people who are damn confused. The people who are chanting only about the meaning of community/interaction and ignoring all the other points ARE the people who either need to support this feature anyhow or they think that they are social marketing genius because they have “real communication channel” made of 20 or 30 people.

Wanna know the fact? If there was no involvement of “feed readers” in a MBL community and only MBL community members were joining MBL communities, most of the BIG MBL communities were too small in the current situation to be noticed. Wanna face the fact? Write a post on your blog saying “You don’t care about your RSS subscribers. They can go to hell because your MBL community is the only thing you care about” and you’ll notice that the next day, your feed subscriber number went down to 3 if you currently have 300 subscribers.

And when you talk about joining a community, will you tell me why didn’t I join a single “wine blog community” if I had to become more visible? Why did I join only technology, seo, marketing, blogging and similar communities that relate to my niche?

In your zeal to collect all opinions on this new feature you seem to be missing those of us who approve of it ;-)

Along with the folks at MBL, I still don’t really see why it should be a problem to receive messages from communities that you have willingly joined (and the “opt in” that everyone is complaining about is implicit in *joining* the community). The examples you cite above of “spam” don’t clear things much. One is from a site that is clearly designed to generate income, with little valuable content, and the other is from a gal who (very reasonably to me) wants to inform her community that her url has changed? I guess I don’t understand why you joined the former site in the first place and the consider the latter communication to be “spam”?

It’s pretty obvious that the reason (some) people are up in arms is because they are finally being asked to *participate* in communities, whereas before “participation” consisted of little more than free advertising of one’s avatar on someone’s MBL page.

The new feature will change the dynamic of MBL from free self-promotion to real community building and I’m all for it.

Snoskred
http://snoskred.blogspot.com/

You do not see a single benefit and I agree. Even big MBL community owners like ilker and Andy are against this feature. Now I don’t see how it was a popular demand. If a community owner needs better features to interact with his community member, why not release a solid solution instead of releasing an incomplete one that’s plain crap?

@Andrew: I completely agree with you on the point that people are misusing this mass messaging feature to promote their communities.

I think, it’s not the fault of the MBL community owners if they are using this system as a promotion tool. MBL team made this feature available to them without thinking about the wrong side. They have always been unable to control spam. And instead of trying to control spam, they’re promoting it over at MyBlogLog by releasing this type of features.

I don’t think a single point where there was any need of this feature. ilker has written in his comments (here and over at MBL blog) that if there was a popular demand for this feature, as they said, there should have been an arrangement so all mass messages sent by community owners are private messages.

Alex also made some strong points in his comments over at MyBlogLog blog. But majority of people think that there should be at least one option to opt out of community messages and I’m 100% agree with them.

And yes, if they build a tool that has 110% chance of getting misused, people will certainly misuse it.

Thanks for stopping by!

maybe I’ll post a message ;)

However, with this new change the desire to promote has completely overtaken the MBL experience. Everyone hopes that my using the new feature they can get a few more hits. In the process they are alienating current community members. This new feature is thus hurting bloggers, instead of helping them.

What is the ultimate point of this feature anyway? It is supposed to be a way to let all of your community members know about something that pertains to them specifically right? Well, why not just have a sticky message or something that you can put on your community page? That way you can write something specific to your community without spamming people.

MBL says that most of their users only belong to a few dozen communities right? If this is the case they can go check out the communities themselves for messages from the community owner. Why do we need to get messages thrown at us?

This new system does nothing beneficial. It simply makes the practice of spamming just that much easier. The thing that I find sad is that people who normally would never think to spam will probably start. Why? Well, if MBL supports something why not do it?

You are welcome! I’m glad that you took the time to let us know your thoughts about the community messaging feature. I’m sure that the people involved in this discussion are going to appreciate it.

As far as Eric and his replies over at MyBlogLog blog are concerned, I think he should accept that by providing no option to opt out of community messages, he has made a mistake. As you already wrote in your first comment over at MBL blog, this step is a warm invitation to spam, spammers and black-marketing types.

I noticed that Eric has asked to many people the same question that what is the benefit of joining a community when one doesn’t want to receive messages from a community owner. I just read his last comment left over at MBL blog:

Alex — I appreciate your input but you didn’t answer the important question.

Given that you think that receiving a monthly email from the author is spam. Why are you a part of their community? What specific benefits are you gaining?

Posted by: Eric Marcoullier
| July 01, 2007 at 10:30 PM

Doesn’t it sound like he is trying to ignore his own experience with many web portals, mailing lists and bulletin boards? Because in my past 6+ yrs of heavy experience with WWW, bulletin boards, email services (e.g. Hotmail), web development mailing lists and other web based services, I have seen that websites do seek your permission before adding you on any mailing list. No matter if it’s a product promotion mailing list or any software development mailing list, you may have noticed that they do allow you to decide if you want to be added on a mailing list or not.

I know that anybody who has heavy experience in Web industry is not going to support this messaging feature. If MBL tries to build its own law for web communication, many people will leave MBL forever.

I just wrote another comment on MBL blog that should clear things up a bit:

Eric,

I understand your view point on this feature and I agree that this puts a “meaning” to join communities. That means you allow them to include you in their mass messages. That’s absolutely understandable.

However, there is one thing you (and other guys who defend this feature) might be missing. Ever since the feature got released, all of the mass messages I got from communities were NOT in PRIVATE. This means that the messages are not only targeted to me but also all those who view my profile.

I agree that being a part of community and receiving a message once a month about what’s going on in their site is not spam but making these messages non-private IS spam.

If you remember, back in the days, I had the same argument for messages with links. I have no problem if someone sends me a PRIVATE message with link. I would like to see when someone I know is running an iPhone giveaway contest on their site, but other people who visit my profile (who might not be a member in that community or not know that person) doesn’t have to see it. Makes sense?

You give people an option to display messages only from their contacts, why don’t you give the option to hide messages from communities and/or with links?

Posted by: ilker -=- The Thinking Blog
| July 02, 2007 at 01:49 AM

To which Eric replied:

Ilker — you are one smart cookie.

Posted by: Eric Marcoullier
| July 02, 2007 at 02:30 AM

I don’t know what else to write there.

If people get used to send messages in private (like me), I think it would solve the problem from my point of view. Messages directed at me is good, but I don’t want people to get free publicity for their new website/contest/whatever from my profile.

That, in my opinion, is the difference between announcement and spam.

EDIT: By the way, I’m glad I disabled the “send messages with email” option from the beginning. That way my inbox is more “spam free” than usual.

Thank you!

By writing:

… and how MyBlogLog folks tried to hide their sin by banning some people. Later, Shoemoney got unbanned when his fans/buddies started writing against MyBlogLog. Eric accepted that he screwed up but notice his words.

I was only pointing my finger @ MBL that they tried to cover their mistake by banning you when you were writing about the exploit techniques over at your blog.

I still remember that Andy Beal announced he would boycott MyBlogLog until Schoemaker gets reinstated. I’m sorry once again for any confusion.

Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to leave the comment!

Update: And I wasn’t aware that they banned you once again. Now I’ve started to get this feeling that I’ll need to digg deeper and write a detailed post on MBL and its SPAM history.

- Avi

You are welcome! :) And yep, I really enjoyed my weekend. Thanks for taking the time to read this post!

- Avi

Actually saying that I was a spammer is kind of interesting… You should actually look up the events that lead to me being banned. While you say I was a spammer I never spammed anyone. Also for the record I still am banned (if i goto mybloglog all i get is a blank screen).

Basically we were working with Scott and he approved what me and Andy Beal were doing. Then when Jeremy Z called Andy Beal a spammer is when I stopped communicating with them privately and started to just blog the various holes in my bloglog.

Course not that the facts matter much. I still was probably in the wrong and I expected to be banned. After we found the code that tracks adsense specific clicks including advertisers and all that it was not something I was ever going to run on my site again.