Send to a friend and review notifications not legal in Germany

Hello!

1) Send-to-a-friend: When a person A wants to send a listing to a friend B, person A enters the email address of friend B as well as his/her own email address. The notification to friend B (“This site might be interesting for you…”) however, does not come from the email account of person A but from my company’s account. The problem is: Unrequested emails from any company to any private person are illegal in Germany.

a) Is there a way to arrange it, that the notification comes from the email account of person A (why otherwise should it be necessary for person A to enter his/her email address)?
b) If not, is it possible to deactivate this particular feature? (I would prefer the first solution).

Send to a friend can be disabled in price packages, or with CSS. Let us know if you need more help with that.

The sending email ‘from’ users is outside of the scope of what GeoDirectory does at this time, and that is primarily because of similar rules about how hosts/servers treat site email (email sent from multiple ‘from’ addresses will create an even higher likelihood that the domain is spam-listed, and the domain points back to the host, reflecting badly on the host itself).

We will look into this for future versions, though it is much more likely that this particular feature is accomplished by members through a customization that meets the needs for their own particular site requirements, should they want the site itself to ‘send’ the email ‘from’ the visitor.

There is a simple workaround, though. You can add another email field to the listing. Then the visitor can click on it and send an email from their own email program. https://wpgeodirectory.com/docs/core-place-settings/#email

This simple workaround is not recommended because it will expose the listing email. This is another reason this functionality is not yet present; it is because in 9/10 implementations, sending ‘from’ the visitor means exposing the listing email to bots and web crawlers that are collecting mailto links.

2) Review-notification to owner of listings:
Whenever somebody publishes a review for a listing, the owner of the listing gets an email notification which contains the user name, IP address and email address of the person who wrote the review. This is illegal in Germany due to data security – name, IP-address and email address are private data which must not be forwarded without prior consent of the owner of these data.

a) How can I adjust the notification so that it only says in general that a review regarding his/her listing has been published (not telling from whom it is coming)?

Third party plugins can be used to edit the WordPress comments notification emails. Notifications are not sent to listing owners, only the site admin, so sharing IP address with “3rd parties” is not exaclty an issue at this time, though we will keep the regulation in mind for future versions. It is the responsibility of site owners to update their site terms to inform their visitors. However, at this time, GD as a discrete plugin does not share any user information with listing owners that is not directly provided by the visitor themself in the ‘send enquiry’ form. That said, every site owner must cnsider that this same statement does not apply to integrations like Google Analystics and Facebook or other third party integrations.

It should also be noted that this IP and email functionality is actually part of WordPress, not GD, as GD simply uses WordPress comments for reviews (but adds additional rating information), and that notifications are, by default in WordPress, only sent to site admins, not listing owners.

Also, here is an article about how to stop using IP Address in comments: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-stop-storing-ip-address-in-wordpress-comments/

If your questions have not been completely address, please write back and let us know more about how we can help.