Rotary Club of Qualicum Beach Sunrise

Last week we had a dozen or so program events and several reports for our executive meeting all added to the web site within a few days. Some members have expressed a concern about the amount of email that resulted when the web site sent an individual notification email for each of these items. If you want to manage the notifications you receive, read on.

Web site users include many past club members and all of our current members. Without a notifications system, users will not know when the site has been updated.

On the other hand, every user has his or her own needs and preferences that must be respected. The club executive and some of our members want to be kept up to date on business coming up at our executive meetings. Some want to be notified as new programs are scheduled for our meetings and others are content to see them as they come up on the front page. On top of that, users of the site have varying tolerance for email messages and these preferences may change over time. To accomodate these various preferences, each user of the web site can set the notifications they wish to subscribe to and can change these subsriptions at any time.

Here's how:

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1. Login

Firstly, if you aren't logged in, the web site won't know who you are and it won't let you see content that is private to our members or to access your personal settings.

If you aren't logged in, there will be a box at the bottom left of your screen where you can do that. Your login name is just your usual name, first name and last name separated by a space with normal capitalization. So for me, it is "Ken Walker".

Passwords are individually set. If you don't remember yours, there is a link in the login box to request a new password. It will email you a link that you can click on to log in and then you can set your password to whatever you like.

If you have trouble logging in, let me know, best is by email, and I will help.

2. Go to "My Subcriptions"

Once you are logged in, the area of the screen where you put in your login name changes to a box with your name at the top and several menu choices. Click on, "My subscriptions". You can see where it appears on my screen below my name in the image below. When there, click on the "Content types" tab at the top. This is where my mouse pointer is hovering in the image. With that done, you should have your own version of a page that looks something like this:

3. Select your "Content types"

I have them all selected, but the ones that will matter to you are:

1. Blog entry: A few of our members post pieces for others to see called blogs. The page you are reading is one of them. If you click on the top of page menu bar for "Blogs" you can see the blog posts to our site. If you scroll back, you will see that there were 20 items in 2011. This article is the first one for 2012. Since there are fewer than 2 of these a month, we recommend that you select these to have notification by ticking the box.
2. Forum topic: The forum section of our website is our club file system. Its main use is the monthly addition of reports and minutes of our executive meetings. We do send the minutes out to every current member each month using the googlegroups members mailing list and you can always login to the website and see the content in the forums so if you want to avoid 8 or 9 email notifications over a few days preceeding each club executive meeting, you might want to untick this one. We recommend that all current and incoming executive select this item.
3. Poll: We have only used this a few times over the last few years. Since the volume is low, we recommend all members keep it selected so that if there is a question where member feedback is sought, you will know.
4. Event: If you select this, each time a new event is added to the web site, you will be notified. This is the source of about a hundred notifications in a year. Events include regular programs, executive meetings, social events, fundraisers and other events. There are other ways to access these items through the Events menu at the top of every page of the web site.
5. Newsletter: This selection controls whether you are notified of new editions of our club newsletter, the Scuttlebutt. Please keep this one selected.

The other choices are not needed. I recommend that you untick all of them keeping those you want from this list.

4. Save

There is a button on the bottom of the page to save your selections. Press it when you are done.

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If you have any concern about email notifications that come to you from the club web site, please give these instructions a try and if that doesn't work out, let me know at kgw@lunar.ca and I will help out.