Subscriber autonomy

Buttondown has the ability to let you give your subscribers the ability to change their metadata, tags, and more. This is called "subscriber autonomy."

When subscriber autonomy is enabled, subscribers can change their email address, name, and tags. They can also unsubscribe (or resubscribe) from your list:

To turn the setting on, go to Settings > Basics and click on the "Portal" feature:

The forms displayed in the subscriber management page are the same as the forms you use to subscribe people to your list: subscribe form inputs. By default, these inputs only change a subscriber's metadata — but, combined with tags and automations, you can use them to give subscribers the ability to change their tags, too.

For simple cases, all you'll need to do is make sure to check the "Automatically tag?" input when creating a new Subscribe form input; this will ensure that, when a subscriber changes their metadata, the corresponding tags will change as well.

Some caveats:

• It is not currently possible to only allow some subscribe form inputs to be changed by subscribers. If you enable subscriber autonomy, all fields will be editable.
• At the moment, the only possible inputs you can vend to your subscribers are "free text", "select", and "checkbox". Support for other input types is planned in the near future.

Checkbox type form inputs create a metadata field that holds two potential string values. You'll need to reference these string values in two different automations for full subscriber autonomy:

The Portal can be found in three places:

1. It's automatically added to the footer of your emails if subscriber autonomy is enabled.
2. You can inject it anywhere using the manage_subscription_url template variable.
3. Buttondown's main login page.