Refreshing the Roster of Raconteurs

I have a penpal in Wales who wrote to me last week. We’ve been in touch for nearly two decades online, and this has gradually moved into long paper letters. If you’d asked me last week what my blog was going to be about, that would have been the topic.

But I’ll come back to that next week because I finally carried out an overdue task on Sunday.

Regular readers will know I run an open-mike night called Hotchpotch. When I took over in 2015, I inherited the passwords for the Twitter account, the Facebook page and the e-mail bulletin list. In the case of the first two, users can self-manage their subscriptions, but the bulletins require manual intervention.

Additionally, some people on the list had moved away or not come along for years, but had never requested to unsubscribe. And recently, the server that hosts our domain name had been failing to deliver to otherwise valid addresses, which then needed to be re-sent in their own separate list.

On Sunday, I wrote to everyone on the list individually, explaining we were transitioning to an Announcements list on Dreamhost. This requires people to click a link to opt-in, and it’s much easier to remove members.

At the time of writing, the new list has 34 subscribers, which is less than a quarter of the old list. However, I’m satisfied we’re now sending to a shorter list of opted-in people than 130+ who don’t necessarily want to hear from us.