Goal here is to increase the amount of show announcement emails that we send while maintaining the high quality of engagement on those emails. 

Over the past 30 days, our network sent 845,196 show announcement emails and 20.91% of them (176,768) were opened. Because the open rate on these emails is so high, and because their functionality fits so well with our mission of helping people find awesome stuff to do, we want to do everything we can to increase the number of notifications that we send without decreasing the quality of users' experiences around them.

Here's how these opt-in boxes work, in the form of a user story:

• I click a 'WIN' CTA button on an event with 5 or less artists attached to it.
• I see the giveaway form. At the bottom of the form is an opt-in box that’s checked by default with the copy of “Send me updates when these bands announce new shows.”
• I can enter the giveaway with the opt-in box checked or unchecked.
• If I uncheck the box and enter the giveaway, I will not follow any of the bands attached to the event. 
• If I leave the checkbox selected and enter the giveaway, I will have followed the bands attached to the event and should receive show announcement emails the next time any of them add a show.
• If I already followed any of the bands attached to the event prior to entering the giveaway, I will remain following them regardless of whether I leave the box checked or unchecked.
• If I have unsubscribed from show announcement emails, I will remain unsubscribed regardless of whether I leave the box checked or unchecked.

The opt-in will not appear for events that contain more than 5 bands because we deemed it unlikely that a user would want to follow all of the artists performing at a festival.

Please note that since this is an A|B test, only 50% of users will see this opt-in. We'll be monitoring the data from HQ over the next few weeks, looking specifically at conversion rate (how many people leave the opt-in checked?) and giveaway form completion (does the opt-in make users less likely to enter?).

We made several platform improvements to make user and category pages more easily discovered in search, as well as making it easier for Google to always serve the first page of a paginated list, rather than any other subsequent page (http://do512.com/events/austin-music/2017/02/10?page=2, should always show up after http://do512.com/events/austin-music/2017/02/10, for example).

We recently ran a test to measure the success of auto-expanding the giveaway entry form on all events that had giveaways.

This test was not a success: The auto-expanded giveaway form surprisingly only increased conversion rate by 5%, while increasing bounce rate by 15% - so we'll be removing the auto-expanded forms today.

Another bug that we tried to fix on this maintenance cycle was this: Whenever a venue name is changed in Radmin, the next scrape by any scrapers associated with the venue will bypass our 'obvious dupe check' and place duplicate events in the pending queue. We found that we can't completely fix this issue without re-writing the entire scraper system, so we've implemented the following instead.

Whenever you change an existing venue's name in Radmin, you will see this prompt:

We recommend following the prompts advice in these situations - and to always:

If you've ever been confused by the difference between Categories and Shortcuts, then this article is for you.