New Car Talk Community Features

Dear CTC Friends,



I wanted to let you all know about a few improvements we’re about to roll out to the Community. We very much value your feedback and aim to fine-tune the site to make it more user-friendly, informative, and convenient for everyone, and we’re excited to introduce these new features.



1. Post Notification function: We’ve heard from many of you that once you post your question to the discussion area, it frequently falls down the list as new topics are added, making it hard for you to find out if anybody’s answered you. In response to this, from now on when you create a discussion, a checkbox will be marked by default to notify you by e-mail when someone has responded to your question. Your notifications will be sent to the e-mail address you entered at registration. Voila! No more lost discussions.



2. Community Guidelines: As the Car Talk Community grows, we want to preserve the spirit of cooperation and generosity that keeps the CTC as vibrant and informative as it has been. To do this, we have created a list of Community Guidelines to serve as an official statement of responsibilities for community members. It’s available here for your review:



http://www…rules.html



If you see posts that do not meet the Community Guidelines, we encourage you to flag them for moderation just as you’ve done in the past.



3. Member Rankings: In honor of our members who tirelessly contribute their expertise to the discussions here, we have instituted a basic ranking system to recognize our top members.



4. Google ads: In addition to the existing sponsorship we have for the site, Google ads will now appear. This was necessary to maintain the costs to keep this community up and running, including bandwidth, storage, and staffing.



We know there?s plenty more to do, and these represent the latest efforts we?ve made toward improving the CTC. We?re planning for further updates. As always, we value your suggestions for further improvements to the Car Talk Community.



All the best,



Carolyn

Excellent changes, Cyberbabe! And, I want to thank you for listing my “Top 20” status.

I suggest this addition to the guidelines:

Be descriptive in the subject line.
A subject line like “Anybody out there that can help me?” is just annoying.

What did we ever do without Cyberbabe?

For those who may want to track discussions that they have contributed to but did not initiate, you can click on the magnifying glass in the upper left hand corner of any discussion page. This alerts you when there is a new post to the discussion. You can turn this off from the alert email or by clicking on the magnifying glass a second time. You only receive one alert that the discussion has been updated in between each visit to the discussion.