Apologies to recent members about Welcome message "links"

[beardie]

It was brought to my attention by a new member (thank you, @LaurieA ) that the email notification of the Welcome Conversation (aka PM/DM), contained links to a religious website (some Buddhist church). I had no idea that this was happening, nor was it my intent. So, for any who might have been upset or concerned about that, I do sincerely apologize.

As for what happened...

The default "admin" account for the site was set to "BD.org". This is a common shorthand I use for BeardedDragon.org. With the email notifications about a "new conversation", the username was included saying "BD.org started a new conversation with you". In addition, as part of the message, I note that the BD.org account is not regularly monitored.

Well, email clients, including many webmail sites, will convert what it thinks is a domain name into a website link, even though I didn't make them links explicitly. So, those became links to BD.org, which is a Buddhist church website.

Thank you again to LaurieA for letting me know about this. I'm somewhat embarrassed, but very happy it wasn't a link to much worse (I can think of a few things that might be more concerning).

To avoid this in the future, I've changed the username to "BD .org" (with a space) and modified the Welcome message accordingly, which should avoid having email clients turning that into a link.

 

[beardie]

*sigh* And I just realized that anyone with a watch on this forum may have just gotten an email with the same effect for each time I mentioned it without the space. Hmmm. I wonder how many times I or anyone else has replied to a post here saying BD .org, and having it do that.

I had been considering removing the post/conversation content from the email notifications. It's convenient to have it, but does result in stuff like this, where an email client is doing more than it should (for the user's "convenience"). Emailing the contents also tends to make many people reply to the email (which just goes to an unwatched "no-reply" mailbox), rather than clicking to login and post their reply.