Dear H2G2 User, We wrote to you recently asking if you were willing for your email address to be passed to the new owners of H2G2. You were invited to opt out of this process if you did not want this to happen. Our analysis tells us that less than ten percent of those contacted have so far opened the email, perhaps because they do not trust that it came from the BBC. This suggests that many of our users will not be able to make an informed decision and we have therefore decided to modify our approach. Where a user tells us not to, their details will not be passed on. Otherwise, we propose to provide the new owners with an encrypted list of email addresses and user IDs. If you choose to register with the new H2G2 website and you enter the email address we have used here, this will enable the new owners to link your BBC user ID with your username and your email address. This means that if you were a contributor to H2G2, the new owners will be able to link your past activity/posts with any future activity on the new website. This means that anyone who has not opted out of the process will receive an email after the sale has been concluded with a link to the new H2G2 website and its terms and conditions of use. They can then choose whether or not to register with the new H2G2 website. If they use the same email address as they used for their BBC ID this will unlock the email address and user ID in the encrypted list we have provided. If you do not choose to register with the new H2G2 your personal information will remain encrypted and therefore inaccessible to the new owners, and will be deleted at the end of the transition process. If, however, you would prefer not to be part of this process and would like us to remove your email address and ID from the encrypted list, then please email us at [email protected]. All the best , H2G2 Editors ....................................................................................................................... "Dear H2G2 User, We are writing with some important information about your H2G2 account. As you may know, the BBC intends to transfer ownership of the H2G2 website. The good news is the proposed new owner is the H2G2 Group chaired by Robbie Stamp, one of the original founders of H2G2 and a great friend of Douglas Noel Adams. If you are happy for the BBC to pass on your email address to the new owner so they can invite you to re-join H2G2 after it has left the BBC, then please do absolutely nothing! The H2G2 Group will be in touch in due course. However, if you do not want the BBC to pass on your email address please click this link. If we do not hear from you within 20 working days of the date we sent this email, we will assume that you would like to be contacted by the new owner. Kind regards, BBC Social Media" Incidentally - Douglas Noel Adams is the one who started 606 I believe - which is why all threads had "dna" in them!!
The email went straight in to my junk so I just binned it! So let me get this right <erm> We were not allowed to spam on their site but they can give someone our details and spam us!
TC, I think your post deserves a wider audience - the more people, especially those of us on not606 who either ignore this approach or preferably tell them to b*gger off, the better. This "opted in unless we hear from you" is a disgrace - they abandoned us to our own devices and we have to take action not to be included in their underhanded little privatisation - tacky.
Maybe Tewks - I ORIGINALLY set my email to put any further from them straight to junk, but on reflection, if it's the same people that started off 606 (BBC only took ownership once it became popular) might be like it was in the good old days. Saying that though, I'm more than happy on this forum
