Most of you have probably noticed–and used–the option to share an item from Current with a friend. But before you click send, there are a couple of things to consider.
Think about who you’re sending to
We’re all passionate about things, and of course we want to share that passion. But it’s a good idea to think about who you’re sharing with. Sending an email to all of your connections and your entire address book (including people you’ve only ever emailed once in your life) isn’t effective, and is really only likely to get your emails blocked in the future. I’m sure your dentist is quite fond of you, but does he really need to get an email every time you add something to Current? (Unless you’re talking about teeth.)
Sharing is intended to let people know about thinks you think they’ll be interested in, so take a few minutes to figure out who really is going to be into this. If someone is totally interested in politics, they might not be as interested in getting a link to that post about the really cool knit R2D2 hat you found and vice versa. And if you don’t recognize the email address in your address book, but you think it was maybe the guy you bought a couch from off of Craigslist….you might want to leave that one off the list.
Make sure you’re formatting your list correctly
As Mario mentioned in a previous blog post, we’ve truncated the list of connections to 100 when sharing. Since this change was made, a number of people have mentioned copying and pasting a list of connections and email addresses as a potential solution. If you have a list of people you share stories with frequently, it’s important to make sure that you’re listing usernames or email addresses only, and that you’re separating them with commas. Using dashes, semicolons, periods, or emails in quotes will not work.
For example, this list will send:
fakeuser, notarealperson, notarealaddress@email.com, anotherperson@email.com
But this one won’t be recognized:
fakeuser. notarealperson; “notarealaddress@email.com” “Another Person”<anotherperson@email.com>
Consider breaking up your list
Okay, so you’ve got a lot of people who are really, really passionate about the same things you are, and you’ve gone over your list formatting with a fine-tooth comb. Great! Now it’s time to break them up…
No, I’m not talking about creating some sort of massive flame-war implosion to narrow down your list. Don’t be silly.
Here’s the deal: the more people on your list, the longer it takes to share an item, and the greater the chance that something will go wrong and cause the whole thing to fail. So if you’ve got a lot of people (say, more than a couple hundred), you might want to consider breaking the list up into a couple of segments. Not only will those process much more quickly, if you do have a formatting mistake somewhere, it will only affect a portion of the people you’re trying to share the story with and not the whole group.
So, you’ve got the sharing down–but you keep getting these emails about stories from someone you don’t know about things you don’t care about. What to do next?
Talk to them!
Amazingly simple, I know, but the first thing you might want to do is send them a quick message saying that you appreciate the thought, but you really aren’t intereted in recycling/cute cat videos/amigurmi and would they please refrain from sharing with you. The key here is nice–odds are, they really do think you’ll be interested, and aren’t trying to be annoying so there’s no need to go all crazy.
(Tip: if the person sharing random stuff with you happens to be related to you in any way, I recommend just letting it go. I love the joke forwards, Mom, really!)
Block them
Okay, so talking didn’t work. You’re still getting an inbox full of emails you aren’t interested in, and you’ve been soundly ignored or on the receiving end of a snarky message. Now what?
Well, you can always block someone. If someone shares a story with you, you’ll see a link at the bottom that says ” To block this community member from sharing items with you, click here.” Just click the link and you won’t recieve any more shares from that person. It’s that easy!
Oops! I blocked too soon..
Well, your inbox is devoid of links that you might like, and now you suddenly find that you miss those daily updates. Or, you realized that the random person you blocked is actually your sister-in-law and you’re on the verge of igniting a family feud that makes the Hatfields and the McCoys look tame. Don’t worry, blocking isn’t forever.
Just go to edit your profile, and click on the connections tab. You’ll be able to unblock anyone if you’ve had second thoughts.
And that’s it! Everything you need to know about sharing and blocking on Current!
–Steph
