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The weekly newsletter is rather simplistic. We get "Top questions last week" and "Can you answer these?", and from my understanding the top questions are taken from the "This Week" tab, and the "Can you answer these?" section consists in a random selection of unanswered questions.

Nice, but pretty basic stuff.

When you're an active member of a community, there are many, many other things that are interesting, and that could be included. Elections are one thing, but there's so much more...

I would like the weekly newsletter to become some sort of a weekly update on a site's activity, showing:

  • How many new users joined that week
  • Reputation rankings, showing top-10 users that week (or link to reputation league for the site)
  • Some metrics on site activity (both for that week and overall/total):
    • Total questions asked
    • Total answers posted
    • Total %answered
    • Total questions closed (breakdown by reason?)
  • Number of badges awarded that week (bronze/silver/gold)
  • Who earned which gold badges that week (would be a short list on most sites)
  • Top-5 meta questions that week
  • Top-5 main site questions that week ("Top new questions this week") tailored to the recipient's favorite/ignored tags, or just a plain top-5 if recipient doesn't have favorite/ignored tags.
  • Links to some unanswered questions ("Can you answer these?")
  • Links to featured content (blog posts, elections page, whatever is going on)

Would that be posssible? Parts of it? Could we have charts? How would the layout look like?

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    Yeah. After I got to be participating everyday newsettlers became, in an overall sense, "continuous" and "boring". This is a very nice idea to light them up a bit.
    – M.A.R.
    Jan 19, 2015 at 16:48
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    I'm not sure how easy this would be, but maybe the letter could also include user-specific things like how much reputation they earned that week.
    – SirPython
    Jan 20, 2015 at 0:17
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    I agree with most of the points except a few. How many new users joined that week That would not be beneficial.Reputation rankings, showing top-10 users that week, I would not gain anything out of this. Number of badges...Not necessary. Who earned which gold badges.. Do we really need to know ? This looks like a more of statistical data. I guess these can be displayed somewhere in the site itself. With all the information above we would have a congested newsletter.
    – user280850
    Jan 30, 2015 at 3:24
  • @CheckBox this isn't a proposition, it's an idea to lead us into thinking about, and discuss what we'd like to see in the weekly newsletter. My ideas have a strong smaller-site bias (a bit like some "how is my favorite site doing?" Weekly update); I'd like people to post their ideas, perhaps even to forge an image of what they would envision a more interesting weekly newsletter and include it in their answer. I mean, there's room for creativity here!
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Jan 30, 2015 at 3:30
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    But you did not imagine a newsletter with tons of information would look congested and that would evade users reading it. Creativity, fair enough from a newsletter point of view. But just think this from a user's point of view.
    – user280850
    Jan 30, 2015 at 4:27
  • That depends on how it's presented. A single chart can pack a heck of a lot of information, for example.
    – Mathieu Guindon
    Jan 30, 2015 at 4:28

2 Answers 2

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+50

I designed this mockup (stats estimated). What do you think?

enter image description here

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Hello Stack Exchange community!

After analysis of community opinions about the current Stack Exchange newsletter, we started to develop its personalized alternative called StackLetter.

StackLetter is a result of our university research project. It aims to provide you with an interesting newsletter which solves the drawbacks identified also in this meta question! If you want to read more about our project or register for your personalized newsletter, please, visit https://www.stackletter.com/.

Project is registered as a Stack Exchange application: StackLetter - A personalized newsletter for the Stack Exchange Network.

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