New Feature: Reminders via Alerts System

This is a quick explanation of the new Reminders system that is being integrated with Pickem. This will eventually include email reminders as well as alerts.

There are 2 Reminders.

1st Reminder. This is sent out once the close time of the current week is less than 48 hours away (but more than 24). Members of each active Pool that have NOT made their picks for a current given week will receive an Alert letting them know that the specific week will close in x hours <--- that is dynamic based on when they actually read the alert.

2nd Reminder. This is sent out once the close time of the current week is less than 24 hours away. It is only sent out to those members of each active Pool that have still not made their picks for the current week.

Members of each active Pool that make their picks after the 1st reminder will NOT receive a 2nd reminder (as they have made their picks).

Reminders are sent out for all Active Pools. Pools that are Locked, Closed and Final are not even looked at during the processing.

You must be a member of an active pool to receive these reminders.

This system is driven off of a CRON Entry (Pickem: Alert Reminder). This CRON Entry is set by default to run every 6 hours. You can bump this up to once per hour, but once per 6 hours should be sufficient for most cases. If you want alerts sent out closer to right at 48/24 hours, then I would suggest bumping the interval checking to once per hour. More than that is just over kill IMO.

This is the MINI version of what will be included in the next major version of Pickem.

Full version includes email alerts, opt out options and other features that will be announced at a later date.

 

Already paying off. 1st Alerts were sent out last night on my site and everyone that got the alerts made their picks today and most of them posted thank you's in the weekly thread.

 

How's this working out for everyone? I can only speak for my own personal site, but its made a HUGE difference between this year and last year. Every week multiple people make posts thanking me for adding the reminders lol participation rates have sky rocketed this year compared to last year.

 

The ability to turn them off is in the next version. Not sure when I will be releasing it, but it shouldn't be too far down the road.

 

good to hear