This is just a quick and slightly tetchy admin post, for the benefit of (some) of those who subscribe to Nearly Legal posts by email. Anyone else can look away now…
I’ve had a few mails from people recently asking questions that made me realise that some clarifications may be in order. My apologies if this simply doesn’t apply to you.
1. The email updates are simply the content of any post that was added to the blog in the 24 hours before 6 am that morning. What the emails don’t include are the links to the archives, the comments that readers add to the posts, often with updates, further details or new lines of argument, or indeed the edits that are sometimes made to the posts as we find out more. For that, you have to visit the blog itself. It is just a click away…
2. I’m looking at a particular London area local authority here, but there is a general point. We do what we do on this blog for free, because we enjoy it. However sad this may make us, we are not sad enough to send you a precis of a case you want to know about because you email to ask us to.
You are very welcome to come to the blog’s website and use the search tools, the very ones that I have spent some considerable effort improving. That is what it is here for. If it is a housing related case from the last 2 to 3 years that you are looking for, a case note will very likely be in our archives. But, to be blunt, we are not going to dig the case you are looking for out for you and email you the results. At least not unless you provide us with an address to which to send the invoice ;-) Our rates for doing your searches for you are available on request, but we aren’t cheap.
3. If you have put in your email and clicked the ‘subscribe’ link but then haven’t received any emails from us – and we usually have fresh posts several times a week – there are three potential reasons why it has gone wrong:
i) you have put in the wrong email address (Typos etc. It happens. Quite often);
ii) Your firm/organisation/email provider/email programme has filtered out the confirmation email as spam. This seems to happen quite a lot. It might have something to do with ‘Nearly Legal’ appearing in the address and subject. Either contact your IT department and get them to clear the name or domain ‘nearlylegal.co.uk’ (you may need to reassure them we are a genuine housing law related site) or check your spam folder. There is not a lot we can do about this from our end, but without the link in the confirmation email being clicked, you won’t get the updates;
iii) you ignored the confirmation email, in which case the solution is obvious.
That’s all. I apologise for any note of exasperation that may have crept in. And, just in case it needed making clear, if you subscribe, Nearly Legal will have your email address, but you have our commitment that it will not be intentionally passed by us to any third party, or used by us for any other purpose than NL email updates, or, once in a blue moon, a direct email from Nearly Legal to you. The service is provided by Google, but there is no term that we can see in their conditions that enables Google to make any use of or make public your email address beyond sending you the NL update emails.
Well said Nearly Legal!
Cheeky, cheeky nameless Local Authority expecting nice MR/Ms Nearly Legal to do your legal research for you. Just be glad your not named and shamed and put on the Nearly Legal Naughty Step!
Tickled that nameless LA subscribes.
You should explore further the idea of charging them ;)
Unless a LA reviewing officer submits contributions to NL themselves :)
Cait
Cait, a lot of LAs subscribe and some RSLs. Don’t know if it is legal departments, HPUs, Housing or all three. We’re very happy for them to subscribe, as indeed we are for anyone to do so. Free housing law stuff for all! (or at least anyone actually interested…)
Right on, brother. Tempted to re-blog that one for our email subscribers.
On point 3, though, this may be something out of people’s control. I certainly would not be able to get our IT team to whitelist nearlylegal.co.uk, and indeed the central spam filter does catch your domain. So, there may not be a vast amount that people can do about it; perhaps suggest setting up a free Gmail account for such things.
All that does, of course, beg the obvious question: why on earth did you go with a name that has more in common with dubious porn sites than any law blog?!
Martin, there is a far too long answer to that question, which doesn’t include any original plans for that kind of alternative career, but which may involve me not even having thought about it until after I’d bought the domain name. In fact, it wasn’t until my webhost politely asked me what I intended to do with the site because they didn’t accept that kind of dubious, that it hit me.
Strangely enough, the soon-to-be-disappointed searchers generally appear to be looking for things at the considerably more mature end of the spectrum.
Ah, the infamous “nan porn” searchers? I like to think that although initially disappointed, they all end up feeling quite enlightened about housing law and decide to find other ways to fill up their day. Perhaps not.
Im so naive – I had to sit and think why on earth ‘nearly legal’ might be considered to be porn….
it did get blocked very briefly at my work place – but the block unplugged.
Cait
As we all know, some local authority officers pose questions about how they should conduct homeless reviews (ahem, cough, er, while pretending to be working for Shelter). I hope those individual(s) regularly check this site for analysis on the law?