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LifePoint
USA
10 Posts |
 Posted - Apr 24 2007 : 14:59:40
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When creating Groups, the program strongly cautions against using group names that include spaces. From a "programming" standpoint this makes sense and I understand why it's important. But from a customer standpoint, it's really not very user-friendly. Here's what I mean...
When a customer subscribes to one of our mailing lists (Groups), we have MLK set up to automatically send them an email confirming to them which mailing list they have subscribed to. To do this, we insert the Group field into the email, and the results look like this:
Your subscription request has been processed:
The e-mail address, xxx@xxx.xxx, was successfully added to the group, Lifepoint_womens_newsletter.
Is there any way to create a more friendly name for our Groups? For a subscriber to see "Lifepoint_womens_newsletter" instead of "LifePoint Women's Newsletter" is just clunky, in my opinion. Is it possible to create a nicer name for our Groups and use that in our emails instead?
Thanks in advance for any help on this issue!
Phil
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LifePoint
USA
10 Posts |
Posted - Apr 24 2007 : 15:39:42
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| By the way, does anybody know what horrible things can happen if we DO use Group names with spaces in them? Is it too big a risk to take? |
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xequte
7042 Posts |
Posted - Apr 25 2007 : 00:26:26
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Hi
It might be good to have an option to strip underscores when displaying group names in messages. The only problem would be if a user tried to use the display name when unsubscribing.
You can use group names with spaces. It is unlikely to present you any major problems but you will probably need to check more messages (under View>Options, Errors) due to MLK not being able to adequately parse/understand the command line.
Nigel
Xequte Software
nigel@xequte.com |
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LifePoint
USA
10 Posts |
Posted - Apr 25 2007 : 01:13:21
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Okay, thanks Nigel. I certainly understand why you need to have Group names without spaces when it comes to being able to read them correctly within your program. Right now you have a place to enter the Group Name and a Description for the group. Perhaps adding just one more field called Group Display Name (or something like that) would solve the problem. That way we could enter the Group Name with no spaces and a more user-friendly name in the "Group Display Name" field. Then we could choose to enter that field into our confirmation emails. It's not a huge deal... just a thought.
By the way, MailList King is one of the most comprehensive, well-thought-out pieces of software I have ever seen in my life! We just discovered it on Sunday and have already been completely blown away by all the features in this product. Honestly, you guys should be very proud of this. It is a masterpiece! We will definitely be buying it and putting it to good use.
The only feature I can think of that would be the icing on the cake to such a stellar product would be if it had some kind of "tracking" features included so we could see who has opened our newsletters, who clicked on what links, etc. I did notice that we can use "Read Receipts", but since this is usually an intrusive thing for most recipients, it would be better handled another way. I'm sure tons of your customers would benefit greatly from this kind of feature, especially seeing what a fantastically detailed job you've already done with the current charts and statistics. I can't imagine how good your tracking stats would be!
Anyway, keep up the good work, and thanks for a superb product!!!
Phil |
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ILH
Canada
120 Posts |
Posted - Apr 25 2007 : 12:38:58
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I threw caution to the wind and chose group names with spaces - for the exact reason Phil explained - because the names would have confused the subscriber if the underscores had appeared in them.
I regularly monitor the web forms coming in - as well as any error messages that are generated (very few). Its been about 9 months and so far I haven't found any errors resulting from group names with spaces. <knocking on wood>.
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Ian Hubling
ian@hubling.com |
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LifePoint
USA
10 Posts |
Posted - Apr 25 2007 : 13:19:50
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| Cool. That's good to know. Thanks for passing that along, Ian! |
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xequte
7042 Posts |
Posted - Apr 26 2007 : 04:20:54
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Hi
I agree that tracking functionality would round out the feature set for MLK, unfortunately we would either need to offer a server side tool for customers to install (which would present technical issues for 90% of users) or we would need to do the server side on our own servers (which could cause problems with our hosting company if it was misused by some members for spamming).
We have thought of separate "Display Names" for groups, but I think the problem would be that members would try to subscribe/unsubscribe by the "display names" so MLK would need to support the display names too. Which would bring us back to the spaces in group names issue 
I think you should take Ian's advice and try group names with spaces. Perhaps we overplay the danger of using them  but then we're programmers and we like code that is easy to read.
Nigel
Xequte Software
nigel@xequte.com |
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justuspost
USA
71 Posts |
Posted - May 02 2007 : 14:44:33
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Hi,
Here is what I did to resolve this group name display issue. I don't think that it is a replacement for further development with in the software, but it works for now.
I use a php/dhtml (AJAX) subscription management form. When submitted, it passes values to a PHP mail script that compiles a mail with the values of this form in a formatted e-mail that MLK checks and can process.
The html form shows whatever name you want next to the check boxes.
The value of the check boxes is the MLK name for the group.
This is passed to the mail processing script.
The mail processing script passes the MLK name to the e-mail it sends to MLK and then echo's to the user 'the request has been submitted' and they have subscribed to group 1 group 2 etc. dynamically.
I have the MLK value go into the email sent to MLK, but I have a user friendly value echoed to the user. This is done in PHP like this..
foreach ($_POST['box'] as $box) {
if ($box == 'MLK_Value1') { echo 'User friendly value 1<br/>'; }
if ($box == 'MLK_Value2') { echo 'User friendly value 2<br/>'; }
}
This way the user only ever sees the user friendly value(on the html form and after they submit). They need not worry about what you are calling it in MLK because they will use the form to subscribe and unsubscribe to the future mailings anyways.
MLK will auto process all of these mails. I have the script send the mail to an address that is not published or used in MLK. This will keep a strong % of the mail being sent to the box ONLY for MLK. You can forward the mail the MLK cannot process to another address. You will only need to catch the folks who reply to the newsletter or send you a mail directly.
Doing it this way, I have been able to incorporate unsubscribe, subscribes, subscription changes and e-mail address changes/updates into 1 form. The form has all dynamic fields and user options based on what function they would like to fulfill.
Hope this helps. If anyone needs a PHP script/subscription management page built, let me know. :-)
Justus |
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LifePoint
USA
10 Posts |
Posted - May 03 2007 : 02:10:36
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| Thanks Justus. That's an interesting approach to this issue. Looks like you figured out a way to cover all the bases in one shot. |
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Better Group Descriptions
