Office Hours » May 2025 » Q&A | Exploring Notes, Posts & Comment Behaviors

I want to give thanks today to the active engagement from so many members of our community including

Lynda Heines

of

Heines Sight

,

Bill Moore

of

Family History with Bill Moore

,

Jennifer Jones

of

Tracking Down The Family

,

Kathy Stone

, and

Lori Olson White

of

The Lost & Found Story Box

.

These sessions are all about helping each other over the speed bumps of getting started on Substack. Today, our conversation quickly moved to a discussion of ways to optimize our use of features to help us in a shared goal of encouraging one another in this community. 🥹

We started on the right foot as Lori Olson White¹ shared a stunning observation about Notes and behavior differences between “Restack” and “Restack with note.” That led to a lively discussion about how to preserve the goodness of comments to shine a light on other writers here on Substack.

Substack Formatting Behaviors for Mission Genealogy

222KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Breakdown of different behaviors given different Substack features.

Download

That led to a conversation about how knowledge of feature functionality is just the start. Much of what we’re doing in these meetings is refining best practices for a shared goal of supporting each other as family historians. (Beware of warm-fuzzies. Excessive, I don’t think so.)

Other topics we covered included:

• Ways to make best use of scheduled posts (and a subtle feature/failure to watch out for if you travel and schedule from the road.)

• Cross-posting and both the benefits (exposure) and subtle limitations (where posts might appear in your own publication), as well as alternatives (embedding someone else’s post in your own publication.)

And finally, a lively conversation about:

• External content shared in Substack notes and whether it’s “too Facebook-y.”

All around a terrific discussion that reminds me that these sessions have turned into something that’s more about refining best practices for our community of family historians and genealogists.

In case you missed it, Bill Moore and I had a terrific conversation about today’s program AND the Roundtable discussions next week in my

Projectkin Community Forum

live program on Sunday. You can see that recording here:

Projectkin Live: This week, nurturing Genealogy on Substack

And be sure to register for one of the two scheduled Roundtable programs next week. Each will be as unique as our participants, but are scheduled at times friendly to the Atlantic and Pacific regions. Bill will be my guest co-host in the Atlantic-friendly session while

Diane the FH Bowerbird

will be my co-host at the Pacific-friendly session. To join us please register at:

Join us next week for our Roundtable discussions!

Be sure to register for your most convenient session and add the event to your calendar.

1. Subtle tip: Did you know that if you “@” name a person more than once in a publication post they’ll get more than one notification? That’s super annoying, so I’ve discovered that a best practice is to name them once, then… just mention them.

Also, while we’re on subtle tips… did you know that to prevent magic symbols like “@” from taking their special roles like searching for people to name, all you have to do is surround them with “quotes” or (parentheses.) It also works to prevent URLs from attempting to embed in Notes. Heard it here first!