Change to Community level reports

[KelAuth]

All existing Community level reports will automatically be changed to the new version on August 1st, 2021.

The change
After a lot of research to understand how members are using our service, we have come to the conclusion that it would be better to remove two options from our free Community level.
-Automated speed testing
-Email notifications

The plan was to have a new level in between Community and Extended called Standard but this plan has changed as it was causing a large amount of additional programming and complexities. Those who have purchased a Standard upgrade will continue to have it until it runs out.

Challenges
We have found that many join the service, set up agents and never interact with us or in the forums in any way what so ever. Decisions on what items we should spend time on are often made through feedback and input from members. Without that, it is difficult to know what to focus on while wanting to maintain a free version of the service.

Speed testing for the casual member (Community)
Speed testing should never be enabled and forgotten. There is a huge resource requirement when it comes to speed testing so this option is being moved to our optional Extended reports.
Note that we have added the free nPerf speed testing tool into the top menu for all members. There is no cost to use this tool. It is a preliminary version with more to come.

Flagging emails as spam
We have found that many Community level members rely on emails to monitor their Internet service. Because of this, many do not read the help information or check the forums and we find ourselves inundated with email support.

We believe it would be more productive to log into the dashboard regularly to learn more about the service, even ask questions in our forums to better understand what the reports actually mean.

We have also identified that many sign up and once finding and solving their Internet service problems, find they no longer need OutagesIO for the moment.
Many of those members prefer flagging notifications they enabled rather than logging in to disable them. This has the nasty effect of potentially blocking emails for others using the same email service that do want their notifications. We hope that eliminating emails for our free Community version will help with this problem.

Support
We offer the Report problem button so members can report bugs, problems, help text needing updating, etc. It would be more productive to use our forums when ever possible as it allows us to keep track of help requests and would allow other members to find answers if they are asking similar questions.

Free Community level reports
We are committed to offering a free level of OutagesIO because consumers have shown a need for such a tool. Our Community level has helped many people to find and solve their Internet issues.

Thank you for using OutagesIO