In the far left hand column of the Pleasantville Way Neighborhood Watch home page, under "Questions & Comments", there is a linked heading entitled: "E-mail Your Neighborhood Leader". When you "click on it", a new page appears with required fields for your name and e-mail address and a "message box". Whatever information you type in the "message box" will be sent to all of our member-neighbor's e-mail box thus providing instant alerts. Don't forget to click the "SEND" button.
Bruce posted his concern - "Looking for Gas?" - by clicking on "Discuss local issues and concerns with your neighbors", located under the heading Discussion Forums.
His posting, however, WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SENT by e-mail. It would remain on the web awaiting a member to visit - whenever that might be. In order to generate an instant notice that a web posting was made, Bruce would need to send an e-mail as noted above. The e-mail to the neighborhood leader feature triggers a mailing to every member. Bruce could have simply typed "new topic" in the e-mail message box and pressed the SEND button, then all member-neighbors would receive an e-mail from Bruce that would look like this - Neighborhood Link Comment bruceconway_4@msn.com - . "New topic" would appear as the message. This then would alert you to go to the Pleasantville Way Neighborhood Watch website and look in Discussion Forums for his posting.
A quicker and less cumbersome way to notify member-neighbors is just type the original information in the message box in the first place and ignore the Discussion Forum altogether. Posting and formatting of the message could be left to the coordinator. It would be up to the originator to decide how they chose to alert the neighborhood.
The advantage of using the "e-mail your neighborhood leader" feature is obvious: 1) Provides instant real time notification 2) Eliminates the randomness of surfing the web in which case you could miss an important neighborhood observation.
