Greetings and Salutations -

Thank you so much to those who have tested out the new forums. If you haven't tested your forum yet, please take a moment to post in them and see if the permissions are working properly. The more testers we have, the more devices we can see to work or not work. I can then send notes back to the forum people about things they need to fix.

I still haven't quite nailed down how to prevent the forums from sending out those update messages about "you have a new post on the thread". Those messages are causing us to be blocked by mailers like Hotmail as spammers, because they keep going out to large blocks of people automatically. I've made another change and I think I've finally gotten them to stop sending. If you get one of those messages after now, please let me know.

I know forum traffic in general is far quieter than it was five to ten years ago. That's a normal evolution of the web. Most people are now using Facebook and Twitter and such for their conversations. That's OK. The forums still create Google links for us which then drives traffic to our articles. So even if people aren't commenting on the forums now, having URL posts in the forum creates link relationships with our articles which brings in more readers. The forums still serve an important purpose in the overall marketing of our writing and content.

Everything changes. That's the way of the web. Things change, and then change again, and we ride the wave to best use the new situation.

As always, ask with any questions!

Sincerely,

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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