On good intentions and bad spam
Over the past few weeks we’ve been doing loads of fixes on 23, and yeah, we have also added some new features such as:
- An improvement of the UI in the Subscriptions viewer. For example, you can now see all new photos in the same view without clicking all contact links.
- Now, only contacts with access to your private photos (you can set that up in the Contacts section) will be able to download your original photos (that is, those very large photos).
- Changes in the organize feature allows you to choose as many photos as you’d like.
- Users will now be receiving mails when their photos are commented. This feature can be disabled in the Profile section.
BUT — as we’re speaking of mail — not all new features were for the good. We thought we’d build in some automatic mails, which would be sent as friendly reminders to our users. For example, new users who hasn’t uploaded any photos three days after registration will be receiving a mail with some basic upload tips and tricks.
We also toyed with the idea of having an automatic mail for users who hasn’t logged in for a month, and we even wrote the code. But as we’re not really into spam ourselves we decided not to use this anyway.
However, someone (and while I’m not pointing any fingers, if you were here with me right now,… well, then you’d be looking at him) forgot to deactivate this procedure on the live server. As a result we sent out mails to some registered users reading “Hi user, it’s been a while…” (See, as we never did intend to utilize this function we didn’t bother to write a proper mails).
That’s it. If you received that mail: First of all, sorry, we never intended to send you anything that meaningless. My bad! And secondly, man, where have your been — it really has been a while?
To make up for all of this (and this very long post), we’ve added a few discussion forums at 23hq.com/forums, and we promise that our api is right around the corner.