We've removed legacy teasers. You'll now want to use paywalls to gate your premium-only content: they're more flexible, more fun, and — most importantly, even if its uncouth to admit it — much easier for us to maintain long-term.
We'll dive into the details below, but to lead with the most important thing: this is a workflow change, not a functionality change. If you're still using legacy teasers, you'll be able to continue gating your premium content in the exact same manner — just with a slightly different approach.
What was wrong with the legacy teasers?
(This is gonna be a pretty technical explanation! Brace yourself!)
A few months after we first introduced paid subscriptions back in 2022, we shipped the first iteration of what we are now somewhat disparagingly referring to as a "legacy teaser": an additional checkbox in the email editor that would allow newsletter owners to gate their premium content. This "met the spec", as they say, but in the process of doing so introduced a startling amount of complication into our codebase: now, suddenly, the answer to "who should receive this email?" was more complicated than looking at an email's content and audience. This ingrained itself throughout our codebase.
When the time came to evolve this approach — largely for UX reasons! — we came up with the lovely paywall component that the vast majority of you know and love. The paywall component accomplishes a few things that the legacy teaser does not: most of all, it's flexible. Because the paywall component is part of the main editor, you can do things like add template tags to the paywalled text, and preview it alongside the rest of your email.
I don't care about any of that. How do I send my paywalled email now?
We've migrated your existing emails with teasers to use this new approach, so the best option is to open those and get a sense of how they work.
But, from first principles:
- If you were using a standard teaser, just add the paywall block wherever you want to gate your content.
- If you were using a custom teaser (where the copy for free users was different from the copy for premium users), add a Free-only block with the copy for free users, and then place the paywall block below that!