Newsletters

A hub's newsletter carries news, announcements, and highlights of new content: a new tool released, a workshop coming up, a change to how something works. It is the hub telling you things, on the hub's schedule.

You read a newsletter; you do not write one. There is no way for a member to compose or send one from the hub's own pages — writing and sending them is work a hub administrator does in the administrator interface. Everything on this page is about the receiving end: reading past issues, getting new ones by email, and stopping them. If you want to publish something yourself, you want a blog; if you want to reach one group, a group's own announcements do that, where the hub has that plugin enabled; see Groups.

Past issues are readable on the hub at /newsletter, and you can have new ones mailed to you by joining a mailing list. You do not need an account to read them or, on most hubs, to subscribe.

Reading a newsletter

Go to /newsletter. The page shows the most recent public issue, with Past Newsletters & Updates listing the others down the side. Click one to read it; its address is https://<your hub>/newsletter/<alias>, which you can share.

Two buttons sit at the top of the page. Save as PDF turns the issue you are reading into a PDF and downloads it. Subscribe To Mailing Lists opens the subscription page described below. A Newsletter Help link in the sidebar explains how the hub tracks newsletter opens and clicks.

Subscribing to a mailing list

A hub sends more than one newsletter — a general bulletin, a list for tool users, one for people teaching with the hub — and each is a separate mailing list you join or leave on its own. Subscribing is what gets an issue into your inbox; reading /newsletter does not subscribe you to anything.

Press Subscribe To Mailing Lists, or go to /newsletter/subscribe.

If you are not logged in, the hub first asks for an email address. Type it and press Continue as Guest, or press Login to sign in instead. If the address you type already belongs to an account, the hub asks you to log in rather than letting you manage that account's subscriptions as a guest.

The subscription page has two sections. My Mailing Lists shows every list your address is already on, with a checkbox each. Public Mailing Lists You May Be Interested In shows the lists open to anyone, with their descriptions. Check the ones you want, uncheck the ones you do not, and press Save Mailing List Subscriptions.

Every new subscription starts unconfirmed. The hub emails you a link; until you click it you receive nothing, and the list shows Not Confirmed beside its name with a Click here to resend confirmation email link if the message did not arrive. Following the link confirms the subscription immediately.

Private lists never appear here. Someone who runs the hub has to add your address to one — so if you were told to expect a newsletter and cannot find its list on this page, that is why, and asking the hub's support staff is the way in.

Some hubs also put a single-list sign-up box in a page sidebar. Type your address, submit, and confirm from the email exactly as above.

Unsubscribing

Nothing here is a trap. There are three ways off a list, and the one to use depends on where you are when you decide.

• On /newsletter/subscribe, uncheck the list under My Mailing Lists and press Save Mailing List Subscriptions. The list then shows Currently Unsubscribed; re-checking it later sends a fresh confirmation email.
• Use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any newsletter you were sent. This opens a page naming the list, asking you to confirm, and offering a Reason for Unsubscribing: too many emails, content isn't relevant to me, I don't remember signing up, privacy concerns, or Other with a box for your own words. Press Unsubscribe to finish. The reason is optional and is passed to the hub's staff.
• For the hub's own members list — the one every account is added to at registration — the unsubscribe link asks you to log in first, because leaving it means turning off the email preference on your profile.

Email tracking

Newsletters sent from the hub normally carry a tiny invisible image and links that pass through the hub on their way to their destination. That is how the hub counts how many people opened an issue and which links they followed. No message content and no reading history is shared outside the hub. The Newsletter Help link on /newsletter explains it in the hub's own words.

Email preference links

Some hubs send messages containing a personal link back to an Email Subscriptions page, of the form /newsletter/email-subscriptions?user=…&campaign=…&code=…. The code in the link identifies you, so the page opens without a login and lists the kinds of message the hub sends — news and announcements, the newsletter itself, and any topics the hub has defined. Set each one and press Submit.

These links expire. If yours has, the hub says the code has expired and sends you to the front page; ask for a new message, or set the same preferences from your profile.