SQLServerCentral.com Email Changes

By now I'm sure most people realize that we support this community and the site through advertising. We send out newsletters, have ads on the site, and even have taken a few on our books to help pay for the costs of running the site. And Andy, Brian, and myself would really like to thank everyone that bought a book or shirt from us. That provides us with more motivation and support than you can imagine.

We try to minimize the advertising as much as possible, however, as we're just like you. We don't want to visit a site where the advertising outweighs the content. We don't put up ads inside the articles, don't break up most articles into multiple pages to get extra hits, or play the games that lots of other companies might do.

As a result I think we've built the best SQL Server site and one of the best community sites period on the Internet. And I think many of you agree based on the kind notes and comments we've seen posted here. We love to hear that stuff; it certainly helps keep us motivated. Keep the criticisms (good and bad) coming as well as suggestions for things that you'd like to see in the future.

This is a business and we're trying to ensure it's a successful one. So we're making a couple changes to our systems that will help us and provide you with better information from our vendors. The first change is that your profile page now works and has a list of subscribe/unsubscribe checkboxes at the bottom. It's been long overdue and some of the infrastructure upgrades of the past few months have made it possible. This allows you to manage your SQLServerCentral.com and Database Daily subscriptions as well as two new ones.

We hope you'll continue to receive both newsletters as that's one way you can support us without directly sending us money. We'll take your money, but the newsletters are a great show of support (hint, tell your friends 🙂

We've decided to add two new mailings, however, to help pay for some more things we're trying to get going this year. The first is a vendor mailing that we'll limit to no more than once a month. Having ads in the newsletter is one thing, but face it, most of us don't click on them. However, a mailing with just information about a product is something that you might use to make a buying decision. Or you might file it away as a tool to look for in the future.

WE'RE NOT SELLING THE MAILING LIST

I want to be clear on that. We're not selling your email address as we hate that as much as you. We're "renting" the list. In other words the vendor will send us the content and we'll send it out, just like we send our newsletters today. And it will be no more than one a month. We haven't sold any yet, so it may not even be every month, but you can opt out (we hope you don't) and it's a way we can pay for the ever increasing costs of running the site.

The other mailing is a SQLServerCentral.com one, where we can ping you about our store and the products we offer. This will be less frequent, we're thinking once a twice a year. Most likely when we come up with something new, we'd like to be able to let you know about it. Not every week like Best Buy or most other retailers, but once in awhile when something changes here.

We're making this announcement because we're subscribing everyone by default. As I mentioned, we haven't rented any lists, so the first mailing won't come until February at the earliest, so you have time to opt-out if you choose. We hope you won't and give us your support, but we understand if you do.

Before you do, however, try setting up a folder and an Outlook rule to move the newsletters automatically into that folder. You can move everything from sqlservercentral.com in there and when you have time, go through them to see if anything interests you. If not, delete it and get back to your busy life.

Either way, we'd like to thank everyone for their support and contributions to the community.

Steve Jones