One Inbox to Rule Them All — The Stoked Dispatch, December 2025
Welcome back to The Stoked Dispatch — the monthly update where I tell you what we built, why we built it, and attempt at least one joke that doesn’t make my co-founder cringe. (Success rate: about 40%.)
Dad joke: Why did the email go to therapy? Too many unresolved attachments.
December’s theme is simplification. We spent the month asking: “What if managing your advocacy program didn’t feel like juggling chainsaws?” Turns out, the answer involves putting everything in one place. Revolutionary concept, I know.
Headline Feature
The Unified Inbox
This is the big one we teased last month.
Before: you had conversations over here, introductions over there, advocate applications in a third place. Three different views for three types of things that all needed your attention. It worked, technically. But so does a filing cabinet with three drawers that don’t open at the same time.
Now: one inbox. Everything.
Conversations, introductions, and advocate applications all flow into a single, chronological activity stream. You open Stoked, you see what needs your attention, you handle it. Done.
What’s in there:
- Conversations between prospects and advocates — see new messages, respond, or let them flow
- Introduction requests — prospects who want to be connected with a specific advocate
- Advocate applications — new people who want to join your program
Why it matters: The brands that succeed with advocacy programs are the ones that respond quickly. When a prospect reaches out to talk to an advocate, every hour of delay is trust leaking away. A unified inbox means fewer places to check, faster response times, and nothing falling through the cracks.
I talked to a brand that was checking three different pages every morning just to see what happened overnight. That’s not a workflow — that’s a scavenger hunt. The unified inbox turns that scavenger hunt into a single scroll.
If you only remember one thing from this Dispatch, make it this: one inbox to rule them all. (Tolkien’s lawyers, please don’t email me.)
Quick Hits
Invisible CAPTCHA Spam Protection
Spam bots discovered advocate application forms. It was not great. We added invisible CAPTCHA protection — the kind that blocks bots without making real humans prove they can identify traffic lights. Your prospects won’t see a thing. The bots will see a wall.
Smarter, Quieter Notifications
We took a hard look at how many notifications Stoked was sending and asked ourselves: “Would I want to get all of these?” The answer was no.
So we cleaned it up. Fewer pings, better targeting, and every notification that does come through is something you actually need to act on. Admin notifications now focus on the things that need your attention rather than every single event that happens in your program. Your inbox (the email one, not our shiny new one) will thank us.
Under the Hood: Rebuilt the Engine While Driving
This one deserves a little extra space, because it was a genuinely massive engineering effort that you’ll never directly see — and that’s the point.
We migrated our entire view layer from ERB templates to Phlex — a Ruby component framework that lets us build UIs as plain Ruby objects instead of HTML templates with embedded code.
Why does this matter to you? Three things:
- Faster page loads — Phlex renders significantly faster than ERB. You’ll notice it in snappier admin pages.
- Fewer bugs — Components are easier to test than templates. We catch problems before they reach you.
- Faster feature development — Every new feature we build from here on out is built on a better foundation, which means we ship it faster and with more confidence.
If you noticed anything weird in December… no you didn’t. Everything was fine. (It was actually fine. We tested a lot.)
This migration touched hundreds of files and took weeks. It is — by far — the most ambitious engineering project we’ve done at Stoked. And the fact that you’re hearing about it in a blog post instead of a support ticket is the whole point.
What’s Coming
January is going to focus on the prospect experience. We’ve spent a lot of time making Stoked better for admins — and rightfully so. But the people browsing your community site? They deserve a great experience too. We’ve got filtering, registration, and some infrastructure improvements that are going to make your community site feel like a real product, not just a widget.
Happy holidays from the Stoked team. Go spend time with the people you’re most stoked about. We’ll be here in January with more features and worse jokes.
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