Newsletter Team Making Some Changes

As we prepare to have a neighborhood-elected HOA board, the Courtyards Connection team has taken steps to respond to the concerns of some neighbors about information available in the newsletter’s archives. 

The newsletter itself — an email sent directly to homeowners — is restricted to the recipients themselves. Because it is delivered via email to a defined list of recipients, its information is not available to people who are not homeowners. The only exception would be if a homeowner forwarded the emailed newsletter to someone else.

However, due to space considerations and convenience, the newsletter has provided links to information. These expanded articles and additional photos could be accessed more broadly on the internet.

This feature freed readers from needing to scroll through numerous pages in order to read all the material. But if someone outside the community used key words from an article in a search engine, they could find that page on the web. 

From the start, Courtyards Connection has sought to limit exposure of information. Unless a committee, club or other group included it in a report, the newsletter did not post residents’ street addresses. Email addresses are typically embedded so that “bots” cannot find them. If phone numbers or street addresses are ever included in an article, that person typically had an opportunity to review the article ahead of publication, and the team would remove anything that person did not want posted.

Across the past two years and five months of the newsletter’s history, the staff has sought to balance newsletter accessibility — particularly for homeowners who are not fluent in digital technology — with security. That’s why the staff has not required password protection for access to the newsletter but has attempted to limit information exposure.

Information no longer accessible through the newsletter includes:

• HOA committee rosters

• Contacts for teams, clubs and activities

• “How to Use the Calendar”

• Past features for “Get to Know”

The newsletter team will work with the newly reconfigured HOA board — which will be in place when homeowner-elected members assume control May 20 — to determine how to balance privacy concerns with connecting all of us in a way that is easy and respects the wishes of neighbors.