New Feature: Change Email Address

In response to many requests, today we released a feature allowing members to change their email addresses within Group-O-Matic. To use this feature simply click on ‘Edit Profile & Settings’ under the ‘Control Panel’ section of any group to which you belong.

As always, we welcome your feedback. So don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment.

Transparent Change: Another Login Change

A few weeks ago, we made a bunch of transparent changes to our login process at Group-O-Matic to increase usability (see announcement). After some monitoring of those changes, we are very pleased with the results. Today we are making another minor change to hopefully continue the increase in usability.

In the original emails members and group organizers receive when signing up, we are adding a line in these emails noting that their secure access links are like passwords and not to post them publicly. We haven’t seen people doing this, but since it is possible, we want to warn them ahead of time. Currently this is only in a few of the emails going out, but we are considering adding it to all of them.

As always, we welcome your feedback. So don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment.

Updated Feature: Notifications when Members Join/Leave

Recently we received feedback from a group organizer at Group-O-Matic with a sizable group that it would be nice to know when members leave the group as well as when they join (and who specifically left the group). Right now there are member counts displayed, but if you have a lot of members, it isn’t easy to tell who left.

We think it makes sense that if you are being notified every time someone joins your group(s), you should get notified when they leave as well. As such, we have updated that feature to notify you when members leave. The text associated with this setting has been modified to reflect this change. This setting is under the Control Panel in a link entitled ‘Edit Profile & Settings’.

Note that all members can choose to be notified when members join/leave, just once after a certain number of members join, or not at all. By default, notifications are turned off for new members and it is a choice for the original organizer when they create their group. If you choose to get notified just once after a certain number of members join, you will not be notified when members leave the group. The latter notification will only occur if you choose to be notified when members join and leave.

As always, we welcome your feedback. So don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment.

Transparent Change: From Email Address

Today we are changing the from email address on all Group-O-Matic messages from help@groupomatic.com to groupomatic@groupomatic.com.  (Note: help@groupomatic.com is still a live address and, as such, you can still use it to get help!)  This change is a result of very useful feedback from our group organizers, who noted that the ‘help’ email address can seem like spam.  Ironically, we had chosen that email address to be helpful and avoid spam folders.

After some consideration, we think groupomatic@groupomatic.com is a good choice because it is unique and obviouslly identifies the source. With this change we also took out ‘groupomatic:’ from the beginning of some of our email subjects as this is now redundant with the from address.  This subject change should further increase our email usability by making the subjects shorter.

Finally, we will consider in the future allowing group-specific from email addresses and/or names.  But for now, we want to stick with one from address in an effort to (cross your fingers) avoid getting our mail put into spam folders initially.  As always, we welcome your feedback. So don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment.