Product Updates Where You Work, Instead of in Your Inbox
There is now a What's New panel in the admin. Everything we ship appears there, in date order, with a short explanation and a link to the full write-up.
Why we moved it out of email
Because an announcement email is an interruption about our priorities rather than yours. It arrives while you are doing something else, it is one of forty that day, and the honest outcome is that most of them are deleted unread.
A panel in the admin is there when you are already thinking about your website, which is the only moment a new feature is interesting. It also means you can switch announcement emails off in notification preferences without losing anything, which several people had asked for.
What is in it
- Every release, newest first, with a one-line summary.
- A link to the article for anything that needs more than a line.
- A marker on anything you have not seen, which clears when you read it rather than when you open the panel.
- A filter, because somebody looking specifically at design changes should not have to read about email deliverability.
It does not count toward the bell
Deliberately. The notification counter is for things waiting on you: a message, a mention, an account matter. A badge that increments because we published something is a badge about us, and it dilutes the one signal that should always mean "somebody is trying to reach you".
The reasoning is in notification counters that match.
Including the unglamorous ones
Bug fixes go in it too. The password reset problem, the routing fault, the scanning failures. Those are the entries people find most useful, because a fix explains a thing that had been quietly frustrating them for months.
Writing them up publicly also keeps us honest about how long something was broken.
Where the articles live
On this blog, which is also where everything else we publish lives. If you would rather read it here than in the admin, that works too.
Create your free actor website and you will see it on your next visit.
