so, uh, do you email?
UPDATE 2020-10-23 20:15 CDT
I simplified the whole thing. Now there’s just a single opt-in step. You still get a confirmation email, but you don’t have to click anything to make it work. I also went into the database and just updated everyone to be confirmed. As a good friend said, there’s no reason to overthink this.
Over 150 subscribers now. Feeling good, Louis!
Since launching about 14 hours ago, I already have over 110 people signed up, which is overwhelming and amazing! Thank you!
But there’s something funny I’m seeing in the data: about 30% of you never completed the second phase of the signup, which is clicking the confirmation link in the email you should have received. Now, as far as I can tell, all the emails got sent (except a couple which bounced, and I handled those separately). So that means 30% of the signups must be in one of the following states:
- Got the email, but didn’t read it
- Got the email, read it, will click the link later
- Got the email, read it, clicked the link, something went wrong
- The email’s in a spam folder
- The email just never got delivered for some reason.
Of those, I’m especially worried about 3-5. Those would imply a bug or a misconfiguration—something I need to deal with. So I’m going to break my own rule and reach out to a couple of you in that “pending confirm” state with an email about something other than a new post. Not to shame you if you fall in categories 1 or 2, but to make sure you’re not in categories 3-5, which would mean I have to get busy. And if it turns out most of you are in categories 1-2, then I need to adjust how long I will keep emails around in that pending state before I clean them out.
BTW, if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, the subscription feature is up and (I think) working. Here’s a post about it. Or you could just hit the Subscribe link up top.