CUNY Academic Commons

I (Marilyn) took a crack at this:

"I see you have Jetpack enabled. Here's an idea. In the dashboard, go to Jetpack, then Settings, the Discussion. At the bottom, enable Subscriptions ("Let visitors subscribe to new posts and comments via email, Enable the “subscribe to site” option on your comment form"):

Once you have this enabled, use the email for your listserv as a subscriber"

But today got this reply:

That did not work. Unlike traditional email addresses, a list serve does not have the capability of me “logging” in to confirm the subscription. I do see that the option is available via JetPack but it does not appear to be available behind CUNY’s firewall or its platform. Thank you.

Best,

Henry Smart, III

Assistant Professor

CJM Program Coordinator

Department of Public Management, Rm. 533.45

John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

Thanks for taking a first pass at this, Marilyn. I've added Scott as a watcher, as he may have insight or experience here.

Do you understand the following point?

Unlike traditional email addresses, a list serve does not have the capability of me “logging” in to confirm the subscription. I do see that the option is available via JetPack but it does not appear to be available behind CUNY’s firewall or its platform.

Is he saying that he wants the ability to confirm subscriptions? From the first of these sentences, I can't tell if he wants this feature or not. And I'm unsure what he means about the option being available in Jetpack but not available on the Commons - perhaps we could get more clarification on this?

It may also be worth trying another plugin on the Commons. I believe that Subscribe2 https://wordpress.org/plugins/subscribe2/ has similar functionality.

Yes, I do understand it. I had suggested that the listserv email be the subscriber to the site, but that didn't work because then Jetpack sends a confirmation email to that address which he cannot get to. So Subscribe2 wouldn't work either.

This is sort of like the newsletter issue. He wants his posts to go out to a lot of people but he doesn't want to have to ask them to subscribe.

Ah, so he wants the ability to add users to the listserv without any action on their part, either clicking a subscribe button or confirming their subscription. Making the listserv email a subscriber was meant as a workaround.

I think that most tools on the Commons require subscriber confirmation, as a prevention against spam. Scott, are you aware of any options that fit the bill?

No I don't. But what if the member uses his own email in JetPack, and whenever s/he get am email, have an automatic forward to the listsrv address. Would that work?

Assuming his listserv has a distinct email address, couldn't he also grab the RSS feed of the Events page (or category archive, as it seems to be) and run it through a service like www.feedrabbit.com to send links to new posts via email?

https://cjmanagement.commons.gc.cuny.edu/events/
https://cjmanagement.commons.gc.cuny.edu/events/rss

It does seem like his new Events "posts" recently are just PDF embeds, which isn't going to give users much info in their inboxes, but maybe he's not worried about that. And to echo the spam concerns, hopefully he's VERY sure routing his posts right to people's inboxes like this isn't going to annoy them...

I don't think he would know how to do that. I'll suggest it

The PDFs are a problem.

Unexpected response - "I think you relayed a good “fix”. I will subscribe and create a rule in Outlook to forward a message to the CJM listserv. Again, thank you and your teammates."