CUNY Academic Commons

From what I remember, we decided that members should use an outside service to send newsletters (TinyLetter, MailChimp, etc.) and not use the Commons to to send out posts. The procedure would be to create a post on the Commons and then copy/paste it to the selected newletter app.

Yes, but Tinyletter was purchased by MailChimp and now has this credits system, so Rukshana would like to move away from that paid solution.

Here are the Tinyletter instructions:

Go to https://tinyletter.com/ and set up an account.
Click Compose on the Tinyletter site. Copy your blog post (or whatever content you like) and paste it directly in there. Everything should carry over (jpegs, differing fonts, hyperlinks, etc.) but take a good look.
Click Send Now.
On this first effort, you may not see any progress right away. Check 12 hours later and see if this is there: "Your account has been flagged by our abuse prevention system. Our team reviews all accounts for Compliance with our Terms of Use. If your letter has not been sent after 12 hours, please reach out to our Support team with the username for your account."
If you do, write to them immediately explaining who you are and what you’re doing. You can explain that it’s a continuation of my (mweber) work.
Ideally they’ll respond like this within a day or two:
“Thank you for reaching out about your TinyLetter account. We’ll be glad to help offer some clarification here. Taking a look at the account, it appears that our automated prevention system, Omnivore, detected content, keywords, or activity that can indicate the possibility of harmful information being sent through our service. Upon review, however, we can see that the letter is fine and has been moved back to drafts where it can be resent. We appreciate your patience during our human review. As the specific keywords and content that Omnivore detects are constantly changing, we're unable to provide a full list of all potential triggers, however if you run into any issues in the future, please reach out and we'll be happy to assist. You can read more about our detection practices here:
http://mailchimp.com/omnivore/. Please let us know if you have any questions. We're here to help.”
Note that you have to go in to your newsletter and press send again.

Hm, too bad about the non-free nature of Tinyletter.

I don't have any recommendations for third-party services. I'd have to lean on Scott and Colin to research something that might be a good solution. As for Commons-based solutions, I'm afraid I have to report that, at this time, we're not equipped to provide a WordPress-based newsletter tool. They've caused us too many problems in the past and lie outside our core competencies.

Oh, I remember (shudder). I wrote to the user (who works across the hall from me and is a work buddy) "I see in April 2021 I recommended ". I recommend that you install JetPack which would then allow readers to subscribe to the site. They won’t get a newsletter but they get digests - https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/subscriptions-to-your-site-with-jetpack/" Did you ever give that a try?