The only constant is change. The system keeps being tweaked to provide our users with the best possible tools with which to network and communicate. Over the next few blogs I will detail some very important changes in the ways in which communities operate. These changes will make communities more user-friendly and allow ACDA and other entities to use communities as its communications networks – which is why communities were created. The first two, and probably most important are:

 

1)      All community subscriptions will be set to individual emails. There are many persons subscribed to communities who never receive messages that are posted on the community forums or notices about new items added to the community libraries. This is because whenever someone subscribed to a community their community notifications were set to default to whatever their overall ChoralNet subscriptions were. That situation meant that anyone whose ChoralNet forum notifications were set to digest (a weekly compilation ofall posts to their subscribed forums) was not getting immediate messages from their communities. While a digest format may be great for a weekly update on the ChoralNet repertoire forums, such a setting is not necessarily the best way to communicate within a state ACDA community. So we have made individual emails the default for communities. I would recommend that all community users leave their settings that way for at least a month, just to test the system. If, after that month, you feel that you are receiving too much mail in your inbox from your ChoralNet communities, you can go into your subscriptions settings – located under the My ChoralNet tab on your home page – and set your subscriptions to manage your notifications in any manner you so desire. Be aware that if you wish to be kept abreast of recent happenings in your community, that changing from individual email will take you out of that immediacy loop.

2)      Community Editors will receive all notifications. In the past, a community editor did not receive postings to the community.  The initial assumption was that they would be approving everything and therefore did not need to see it again.  But with many ACDA chapters replacing their websites with ChoralNet communities, most communities will have multiple editors. With multiple editors, if one editor approved a post, the rest would not see it – not a good situation especially when the editors are likely to be the leadership of that community.

 

In the next post, other community changes will be described.