I send out a weekly email digest for the EA Forum.
The emails feature recent posts that have a lot of karma/discussion, as well as question posts that could use more answers.
What people are saying
"Awesome, saves so much time. Thank you!"
"I really like receiving these! It's very helpful, and I often get ideas for sharing things with the rest of [the research org I work for]."
"Thanks for putting this together - very valuable to have a curated selection."
"It doesn't really feel like there's enough stuff on each newsletter - I think having it be monthly rather than weekly would work better." (Not all feedback is positive!)
Unrelated EA Forum feature request: It would be helpful to be able to filter the list of all posts to posts I have already upvoted and posts I have already strongly upvoted. This combined with date and tag filtering would make it really easy to re-find content. :)
Huh, that's a nice idea. And of course a straightforward "filter for posts I've read".
Thanks for trying this!
These are additional functions I'd find useful, but I'm not sure if it's worth the overhead for you:
Also, some blogs and forums seem to offer RSS feed, which I haven't used myself yet but just based on its popularity, seems useful for others.
You can also subscribe to tags, by going to the tag page and clicking the "Subscribe" button. For those notifications you can also choose frequency, in the notification settings on your profile.
You can subscribe with RSS via using the "Subscribe (RSS)" button at bottom of the left menu on the frontpage.
I would be interested in a monthly version
Is there a specific cutoff day to determine if a post has enough karma to be featured in the newsletter?
I didn't realize that this existed until now, is there a way for this to be more visible? For instance, incorporated in the notifications settings (where I spent way too much time trying to find this a couple of months ago)? Is there a way to auto-add people who join the EA forum to this mailing list and unsubscribe as necessary?
Thanks for asking this!
The mailing list being run through Mailchimp makes certain kinds of automated integration difficult (for example, it would be a lot of work to allow people to remove themselves from the mailing list by turning off a "receive the Forum Digest" setting).
I currently promote the digest in a lot of different places, on and off the Forum, but our next step is to edit the signup process so that people become aware of it the moment they create accounts. That's waiting on some broader architectural changes, but should be live in a few weeks to a few months.
We might also add the digest to the sidebar at some point, though that space is valuable and it might be wrong to put something there that won't be relevant to any user more than once.