Can you make it so that I have an option to not get bugged when a donor posts a topic? I don't want emails saying "Oh, I'm a donor, reply to my thread." — it's spam in my eyes (basically advertising).

Not cool.

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Yes, it is a form of advertising. By giving value to our sponsors, that's how we make money, after all, and how we keep the service free for everyone to use :)

You can opt out by going into your member profile and unchecking "Receive Occasional Community-related Email?". However, not only will you no longer receive these types of messages from us, but you'll also no longer receive any email from us, such as the monthly community newsletter, etc.

I'm all up for supporting the supporters, but I don't want people to be able to post a message and get an email sent to me. I want the other community emails, also.
Could you make a separate opt-out?

Making a separate opt-out would devalue the benefit of sponsoring. Let me think about it ...

How many of those emails have you actually received matrixdevuk?

I'm asking because I'm guessing you haven't had that many, maybe only one. The receivers of these emails are selected based on many factors, including posting history to the relevant forum category, and the reputation metrics (rep, up-votes, post quality, etc..). Being a high profile member, and participating to some of the most active forum categories, I imagine I'm among those who get the most of these emails (PMs), and I think I've only received maybe 4 or 5 in total since this feature was put in place, a few months back, if memory serves me right. This amounts maybe to 15-20 emails per year. I wouldn't call that spam.

Maybe this complaint amounts to a storm in a teacup? Just saying.

The way I see it, the donor should get advertising that they need help. It makes sense, by donating they are essentially paying for support.

Dani, while I am not a fan of spam, I think it should remain especially when Mike points out the metrics for who gets the message and their frequency.

Perhaps maybe a DONOR can opt out of the messages from other DONORs if they choose to.

PS I haven't gotten one, but I don't think I'd have to opt out of it. The messages I get remind me to come here.

How many of those emails have you actually received matrixdevuk?

I can answer that. He received one.

How many I've received is not the point.
The fact that I am receiving emails about something that I like to do myself (as in, I like to browse the forums myself) — is annoying because, well, it just is.

You can choose to browse the forums and post and not receive email. However, a free service comes with advertising in order to sustain it. If you want opt-in to receive email from us such as our community newsletter, then you have to also choose to accept the occassional message from our sponsors as well.

The receivers of these emails are selected based on many factors, including posting history to the relevant forum category, and the reputation metrics (rep, up-votes, post quality, etc..).

We actually take it a few steps further than that. The benefit to the sponsors is that by donating, we will select five people that are highly likely to be able to help you. This means that they have received endorsements for the relevant forum, have received reputation (upvotes, etc) for their posts within the relevant forum, but also we do natural language search to find folks who have answered similar questions previously and have very recently logged into the site, and are determined to be more likely to log back in upon receiving a notification email.

I'm all up for advertising via the website, by using Google Adsense or something — but I'm not really happy with receiving ad notifications via email... since that's not a place in which I would like to have this type of stuff.
I want to receive notifications about PM's, but not ones that are not sent by a human.

If you're saying that we should pay for the costs to serve all of this web content up to you by showing you ads alongside the content ... how do you expect us to pay for the costs of sending all of this email to you if you refuse to receive sponsored emails? We send a couple hundred thousand emails out on a daily basis and this requires a mail server and a separate spooling server. If you don't want to receive email-based ads, then it's an option to disable receiving email from us altogether, while still retaining full functionality of the website.

Keep in mind we're, for the most part, talking about receiving four emails a year here. Certainly that's a steal considering all of the resources that it costs us to email you all the stuff you want to receive.

Oh, it's just 4 per year?
Nevermind then, I guess I can stick with that.

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