As a Postmatic customer you may be wondering how using our products affects the GDPR compliance of your site. The quick answer is that Postmatic was built from the ground up to respect privacy and user data, so we’re already way ahead of most email-related services.
We’ve put together a guide to what you need to know about ensuring your site meets GDPR compliance guidelines in respect to both Postmatic and Replyable.
What’s GDPR?
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) is a comprehensive data protection law that came into effect on May 25, 2018. It replaced existing EU Data Protection law to strengthen the protection of “personal data” and the rights of the individual. It’s a single set of rules which governs the processing and monitoring of EU data.
Does it affect me?
Yes, most likely. If you hold or process the data of an any person in the EU, the GDPR will apply to you, whether you’re based in the EU or not. This is especially true if you use either Postmatic or Replyable.
Hi there. Long time, no blog. Things have been quiet here due to the team working on other projects and that tendency life has to grab your ankles, shake you upside down and remind you that your plans are nothing, tiny human.
We’ve made it through. We had a successful launch of Replyable in 2017 and Postmatic continues to see steady use and love from the WordPress community. We’re looking forward to 2018 with some new development, new faces, and fresh ideas.
Bridget Willard joins us as Director of Marketing
You may have noticed things have gotten busy lately on our Twitter feed. And soon, there will be a lot more blogging happening as well. That’s all thanks to Bridget Willard lending a hand.
Bridget is a marketer and strategist who has been working in the WordPress world most recently as Marketing Manager at GiveWP. We are over-the-moon delighted to have her help with Postmatic and look forward to starting 2018 with her on board. Check out her blog. WordPress geeks should especially read her recent piece on the economic impacts of Gutenberg.
Some new features are on the way for Postmatic and Replyable
We have some development planned for early January that will help with compatibility with a ton more popup packages and 3rd party services. Syncing your Postmatic lists with other services will be a breeze. Look for that soon.
We’ll also be giving some attention to Replyable in the form of a few experimental add-ons to increase compatibility with plugins outside of the commenting sphere.
It’s great to be able to shift focus a bit back to Postmatic in the coming months. Look for some new features soon.
We continue our march to being a comment notification system for sites of any size with the release of Postmatic 2.1.
This release sees the addition of two new models for how comments should be delivered to subscribers as well as improvements to email previews in Gmail and most email applications.
Replies-only mode for the busiest conversations
By default Postmatic uses a smooth combination of comment frequency and machine learning to decide which comments are worth emailing to subscribers.
Comments are checked for reading level, length, and relevance. Only the best are deemed worthy of an email.
If a post gets too chatty in a short period of time we withhold new comments and save them up for a daily digest. Direct replies are still sent immediately to the person being replied to.
This system works very well for posts with hundreds of comments, but what if you are subscribed to dozens of posts? Even under the best circumstances you would still be getting dozens of comment digests in your inbox each day. For large sites this is a problem.
The new Replies-only mode solves it. In the Configured Comments tab of the Postmatic dashboard there is a new toggle which enables it. Once enabled, subscribers will only receive direct replies to their own comments. It’s a good solution for certain kinds of sites.
I’m not too keen on the Direct Replies Only option – for me, it’s essentially reverting blog conversations to siloed conversations, which benefits no-one. A number of times I’ve had extra conversations spring up after a comment digest has gone out shows the value of open conversations.
That is a fair word of warning, but which brought us to our next idea…
Replies-only + Daily Digest mode!
As a kind of middle ground between replies-only mode and the default behaviour we’ve made it possible to send direct replies to comment subscribers, but also keep them in the loop at the end of the day with everything else they missed in the conversation. We’ll probably make a tidy checkbox to enable this in the future, but for now all you need to do is set the trigger for Comment Digests to 1. That will do the trick.
By setting Comment digests to 1 you can send replies-only but also deliver a daily digest of new comment activity to each subscriber.
Inbox previews for increased open rates
We made some crafty improvement to the way Postmatic emails display in your inbox. Most modern email clients display a list of your emails and prominently show who the email is from, when it was sent, what the subject is, and the first 2 or 3 lines of the message contents – which is handy for seeing if a message is worth opening.
In Postmatic 2.1 we take advantage of message previews to display the post excerpt or, in the case of a comment notification, the first few lines of the comment. It’s a small tweak that should make things easier for those of you who live in your inbox. It looks like this in Gmail. Notice where the excerpt is showing up:
Message previews now display the post excerpt from the inbox view in all major email clients. Gmail is pictured here.
These improvements will be making their way to Replyable later in the week. Use that new replies-only mode wisely 🙂
The sun is finally out here in Vermont! I hope the snow has melted wherever you are. Here is a quick update about everything going on in the Postmatic world.
Replyable launches – affordable two-way commenting to all WordPress sites
After our fall retreat in Michigan we spent the early part of the winter developing Replyable – the mini version of Postmatic which starts at $3/month. It’s been nice to have a lower-end and simplified product out in the wild. Replyable seems to offer immediate value to any site which installs it – and the simplicity has kept support requests at a minimum.
If you use Postmatic just for comment notifications and need something cheaper and simpler to manage definitely check out Replyable.
We started a new blog to focus on WordPress commenting
With Replyable’s focus on just commenting we thought we would take a lot of the ideas we have on the subject and write about them over on replyable.com. We launched a new blog there and post weekly about the comment scene, new plugins (ours and others), and best practices. Danny Brown has been doing much of that heavy lifting. While he has long been our #1 evangelist it’s great to officially have him on board via his new venture: Social Media for Your Business. I’m increasingly convinced that nobody has their thumb on the WordPress commenting space more than Danny.
Here are a few posts from the Replyable blog you might want to check out:
With Replyable in the wild we can now shift our focus back to Postmatic. We will be working throughout the summer to build features aimed at content delivery and publishing. Last week we pushed a quick update which introduced some filters for better customizing category-based digests. Apologies for the rapid succession of releases. It was our first update to Postmatic with a new package control system (that feeds both Replyable and Postmatic) and we hit a few snags. That shouldn’t happen again.
Next up will be a new replies-only mode for comment subscriptions in both Postmatic and Replyable. Users can subscribe to comments and receive only direct replies via email. I’m not crazy about the idea but it’s been such a huge request for so long we ought to make it happen. I like to think that our comment intelligence and daily digests are the best solution for healthy conversations.
After replies-only we’ll be getting to work on incoming webhooks for better integration with other services – especially optin packages like OptinMonster (and our new favorite, ConvertPlug (seriously, worth checking out).
Postmatic Press supports a healthy democracy
Our initiative to offer free services to journalists has wrapped up the first round of applications and implementations. We’re excited that the first Postmatic Press sites will be rolling out in the next few weeks. Expect an announcement here. We have more capacity in that program so please, spread the word to your news organization friends:
Replyable brings the best parts of Postmatic to every WordPress site. It's affordable, zero-configuration, and built of the same stuff that has made Postmatic the engagement system of choice for WordPress professionals.
Bridget Willard joins us as Director of Marketing
