It's been nearly 9 months since the last newsletter, so a lot to cover since than. This time I will also offer the option for the user to go into their profile to disable future newsletters.

Because there's 43,000+ members on the board, it'll take at least 3 weeks to send the newsletter out to everyone (automated). Below is what I've been working on as a newsletter, please make any suggestions. The goal is to get members who have left to come back

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FROM: Vizzed Spring Newsletter
TITLE: Many New Features and Design: Including Online SNES, GBA, N64, Genesis and Turbo Grafx games!

Subject:

Vizzed Spring Newsletter

It's been a while since the last newsletter (around 9 months) and a lot has changed since. Please read below to see all the new features, vizzed is definitely worth coming back to!

Retro Game Room Updates
I completely updated Retro Game Room which allows you to play even more games online for free for less Viz (you also earn more viz, 100, just by visiting vizzed every day).
-Super Nintendo Games added
-Nintendo 64 Games added
-Game Boy Advance Games added
-Sega Genesis available again
-Turbo Grafx Games Added
-Sega 32X Games Added
-Apple II Games Added
-300+ new hacks added for various systems
-A chat box which lets you chat with people that are playing the game
-And so much more!

Vizzed Board Updates
-Completely new design which is far more attractive and easier to navigate
-New chat bar feature which lets you chat with your friends online (like facebook)
-Completely optimized which runs faster than before
-Retro Toon Room which lets you watch from many classics from the late 80's and early 90's
-New referral system which lets you earn real $ money $ by referring users to the site
-And so much more!

Features coming soon (within 2 months)
-Character creator which lets you create and customize your own "avatar"
-Completely new item shop with way more features which lets your avatar wear your items
-Battle Arena which will allow you to battle with other users using your character, stats and items
-Vizzed Board Game which will be a hybrid between a board game and a huge battle arena in which users will fight together against waves of monsters from various games (like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and other RPGs); more details later
-The rest are a surprise!

Now is the best time to be a part of the Vizzed Board community and we welcome everyone back who has left. We now have well over 45,000 members so come back today and re-introduce yourself and you'll have a big warm welcome back!

To unsubscribe to future seasonal newsletters, please log into https://www.vizzed.com/vizzedboard and go to your 'edit profile' and at the bottom you'll see the setting to disable newsletters.

As a reference, the old newsletter.

From: Vizzed Board Newsletter
Title: New Features: Play Retro Games online - Sega Genesis, Nintendo, Game Boy & Color, Master System, Game Gear, Atari and more!‏

Subject:

Vizzed Board Summer Newsletter

This is Vizzed Boards very first newsletter and we're going to use this opportunity to let all our users know of the awesome features which have been added recently

The Retro Game Room was added to the site a few months ago but it recently has had thousands of new games added and also new systems added to it. On top of that, it has received a complete overhaul and now contains easier navigation, a more attractive look and far more features. The Retro Game Room on Vizzed Board lets you play any game for classic retro games for free online right on Vizzed Board. If you haven't yet, check out the Retro Game Room here

https://www.vizzed.com/vizzedboard/retro/

Games Include:
Sega Genesis
Nintendo NES
Game Boy Color
Game Boy
Atari 2600
Game Gear
Sega Master System

Vizzed Board has the largest collection of online retro games of any site on the internet! Future games to be added include:
Commodore 64
MAME
Super Nintendo
Game Boy Advance


If you have any feedback or questions regarding Vizzed Board, the new features or the newsletter, or if you simply haven't been to the board in a while and wanted to say hey to everyone, do so here:
https://www.vizzed.com/vizzedboard/thread.php?id=6101

I think that these should go in notifications or PM's as well.... but then again maybe not cause that would waste 43,000 rows Shouldn't this be in general chat though or can people read this forum now?

JigSaw: Yeah that'd be a lot of rows but I can just do it as an announcement

I guess I see no harm in moving this to the General Chat.

*moves*

Looks great! I don't know how someone can resist coming back now.

I'm got really nit picky and found two things you could change.

Originally posted by Davideo7

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-A chat box which lets you chat with people that are playing the game game

-Character creator which lets you create your own "avatar"

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This first: typo.
The second: I think it should say "let's you customize your own 'avatar'"

But I like it.

Thanks for letting me know of the types. I instead changed the 2nd one to '-Character creator which lets you create and customize your own "avatar"', creative people tend to respond to 'create' quicker than 'customize', that's the way it is for me anyway.

Anything else I should add to the newsletter? I plan to send it out in a few hours (remember, it'll take probably 3 weeks to finish sending to everyone).

EDIT: Turns out there are a few problems with the Vizzed RGR Plugin that I was going to release today so that will be delayed by a day and because of that, the Newsletter will also be delayed by a day

Everything sounds great, it makes me want to come to vizzed and check everything out! The
board game, battling, and the avatar parts really catch my eye and draw my interest. I'm
really excited for those!

I like it David, hopefully it'll get some of our long lost members to return! It really displays the best of the new stuff, so there should be no problem bringing at least some of them back.

Looks great, I'm sure it will bring some old names back to the new board and maybe draw some new ones where they came from. Only problem is if these people ever check there e-mail addresses or make multiple ones for sites so they don't end getting these like me. Although the one I have on this site is legit, it's my school email but I normally use another one so I don't get spam mail in my primary email.

Even if only 10% of the users check their email, there's nearly 40,000 users on the board that no longer come here so 10% of that would be 4000 and that's still a lot and if 10% of that become active, that's 400 new active users

...except for that it seems like half of the people here now don't even have their email account typed into their profile here, so how are you planning on reaching those people that you'd have no connection to? People that gave up this site, just like how myspace basically died when facebook came out Lol.

Zeldisaster: Well the first year of this forum, we didn't have email addresses a requirement, but that is such a small portion of the overall users.

Users may have left this site for various reasons:
-Not many games (but now we have tons of games)
-Site was slow (but now it's very fast as of a few months ago)
-Not much Viz (as of recently, you get 100 Viz for coming and as of 2 months ago, games are cheaper)
-Forgot about this place (and now we'd be reminding them)
-Got bored of the place (again, we have way more features and games, plus more features coming real soon)
-To busy (that one I can't do anything about but those people may come back eventually)

Ok I'll be sending out the newsletter finally either tomorrow or Monday (or whenever I fix the email issue on the server). Also updated the newsletter content a tad toward the end making the users who left feel more welcomed to come back.

The newsletters are now being sent.

It's too late for this suggestion but it just popped in my head. In future you could offer ad space on them

Also I have also noticed lots of people don't even have emails on their profiles. Did you make it so it doesn't send blanks out?

Perhaps another solution that might not cause so much strain is to make the script send to a % of users throughout the month instead of sending it all at once? Just an idea

Email activation wasn't a requirement for the first year of vizzed so for the first 500 or so users, it wasn't a requirement, most of them still do have their email address entered but some of them don't.

What I have it doing is sending out an email every 20 seconds. This reduces strain and also makes sure I don't exceed my SMTP limit for the day (which is 10,000). There's no way I'd have it send them all out at once lol.

Long time, no see.

Wow, Nick. That's a name I haven't seen since the old Acmlm days. How've you been?

The newsletter has gotten to me. It has been a while since I've seen it. I think the time before the newsletter was a couple years back if I'm not mistaken.

Haha, wow, haven't seen NSNick around vizzed in years

Yeah he use to be a local mod on the old vizzed board of the star wars forum we use to have.

Cyro: Last newsletter was sent around 9 months ago.

Wow, yeah, I bet many old users will come here to check up on their vizzed accounts...