Find a way to let users know about changes/new features

[damianooldoni]

Use case 1

New species are added to the list.

If I have an alert with Species = All, no problem, I get notified about new obs within my alert. But if I specified a subset of species, it's not easy for me to get to know about the addition of other species which I could be interested as well.

Use case 2

A species has been replaced with a new one.

This happened yesterday. It could happen again, although not likely.

If I have an alert for that species only, or a subset of species including it, I will not know why I don't get any observation anymore. I would first think it's just that no obs are made, but that's not the case.

Use case 3

Addition of extra features, improvements of the user experience.

New features and improvements are coming up regularly, that's great. However, they are not communicated at the moment.

Possible solutions

Some solutions popping up in my mind:

• A News page with a chronological list of improvements/changes communicating to people our efforts to follow up bugs, feature requests, etc.. This could be enough for Use case 3. Tweeting about it can help as well.
• Send mails to all users to inform them about addition of new species/features. This is more "disturbing" but I think is necessary for solving use cases 1 and 2. Notice that the use cases 1 and 2 will occur at year frequency or even less in the future.

@niconoe, @peterdesmet: what do you think about it?

[peterdesmet]

I would add a news page (cf. NEWS.md for R packages), where we describe changes between versions. I would not actively push this information to users, but we can tweet about new versions.

[niconoe]

Update: a news page (including a "see/unseen" status per user) is now implemented in the whats_new_page branch. Implementation tests missing.

[niconoe]

Tests implemented!