As I mentioned in my last forum post, the focus of our next major release is streamlining the notification system via a new aggregated digest features. You can read about that here: https://hey.crowdstack.com/top...ystem-for-crowdstack

But there are other pretty significant changes I want to call out in advance, as well.

New Email Format

We've reformatted all of our notification emails. They are much cleaner and simpler. Better yet, they will match your existing site/subgroup theme. If you are using a dark theme, your email's will look the same, for example.

New Email Theming System

Currently, if you want to customize the look and feel of the notification emails Crowdstack sends, you have to apply custom CSS via a pretty complicated page that references all of the unique classes we reference across the dozens of emails that are sent. Not easy to use, not fun.  Worse yet, there is absolutely no correlation to your existing site theme.

We're completely replacing that separate "email theme" system in the next release so that it is MUCH easier to use.  We're simply adding some new email-specific settings to our existing theme editor. All emails will use the main theme to determine look and feel, and you can target the email options in your theme.  Even better, for notifications from subgroups, the emails will reflect the theme in use for the subgroup. There is no support for custom CSS for emails.

FeePod Branding

FeePod is the name of the service we use to manage premium membership payments for Crowdstack sites. We're going to be rebranding that to Crowdstack Pay, which should lead to less confusion for your purchasers, since they already see a "powered by Crowdstack" graphic on all pages.

FeePod Wording

Currently, Crowdstack admins are able to customize all of the wording we use in the FeePod transaction emails (when premium members purchase, renew, etc.)

However, due to legal compliance issues, we will no longer be able to allow Crowdstack admins to change any of the wording used in those emails.  While we love the idea of letting you tweak wording here or there to suit your style, it exposes us to too much risk, since we have to ensure that these transaction emails are legally compliant with all regulatory authorities.

As one example, check out these rules from Visa:

https://usa.review.visa.com/co...tion-rules-flier.pdf

We must ensure that all wording we use in the emails passes our compliance checklist... and ultimately that is one of the things you are paying us to do. Just as importantly, these emails are coming from us (Crowdstack) and to have someone else change the wording that we are sending is potentially damaging. We need to maintain an arms length distance in these emails, since we have a fiduciary obligation to the purchasers.

You will still be able to apply your logo to the top of the emails.

You will also still be able change any of the other public-facing application wording in Crowdstack. This limitation only applies to our FeePod/Crowdstack Pay emails.