After WhatsApp released their new “Communities” feature, St. Lucia Times decided to launch an experiment with our readers by creating our own WhatsApp Community Announcement Group to share our news via WhatsApp.

WHAT’S A WHATSAPP COMMUNITY?

WhatsApp Communities are places that bring related groups together. For example, you can have a school (example: Clermont Greaves Secondary) which also has many classes (English, Mathematics, Science, etc.).

In our example, the school (Clermont Greaves Secondary) is the community and its classes (English, Mathematics, Science, etc.) are the groups within that community.

Each community has a limit of 5,000 members.

SO WHAT’S OUR WHATSAPP COMMUNITY LIKE?

If you join our community, you will be part of our Community Announcement Group (called St. Lucia Times Updates). Your phone number will always remain private/hidden in this community since the participants’ list is not available. No one except the Community Administrators can see your information.

Additionally, only the Community Administrators can send messages. Therefore, the only messages you will receive will be from St. Lucia Times and we will only send 1 or 2 messages per day.

RULES

There is only one rule if you join our Community Announcement Group: Please don’t message the Community Administrator(s). Why? Because the WhatsApp account being used to send the news updates is not being monitored and notifications are disabled. Therefore, any messages sent to that number will neither be seen nor responded to.

HOW TO JOIN OUR COMMUNITY FOR NEWS UPDATES

You can join the St. Lucia Times community announcement group in 1 of 2 ways – by clicking the link or scanning the QR code below:

1) CLICK HERE TO JOIN VIA OUR WHATSAPP LINK

or

2) Scan the QR code below

NOTES/REMINDERS

• Because WhatsApp Communities have a limit of 5,000 members, you may not be able to join once that limit is reached.
• Since this is an experimental feature being rolled out, in the future we will assess if creating another community is feasible or not.
• When you join our community announcement group, your contact information is hidden from all community members except the Community Administrators.
• Please do not message the Administrator because the WhatsApp account being used to send the news updates is not being monitored and notifications are disabled. Therefore, any messages sent to that number will neither be seen nor responded to.