CUNY Academic Commons

Boone, does our move to Reclaim mean will be able to control whitelisting?

There's a couple different things going on here, so let me try to break them out.

Boone, does our move to Reclaim mean will be able to control whitelisting?

No. The whitelisting in question has nothing to do with the Commons. The problem is that the Graduate Center's incoming mail filters sometimes mark emails from wordpress.com as spam.

wondering if you can flush the 302 from the Subscribe2 table for https://gclibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

I've deleted all items from the subscribe2 table for this site. I've got a backup in case something went wrong.

unless you know of a better plugin that allows for subscriptions installed on the Commons that does not use the Wordpress.com domain?"

Colin and Scott, I'm copying you here to get your thoughts. We went through a big discovery process several years ago to help people find a replacement for newsletters. Newsletters are a slightly different use case than subscriptions (assuming here that "subscription" simply means email notifications of new posts) but there may be some overlap. In the past I've recommended that people use Jetpack because I know it to be a well-supported option, and one that's not subject to limitations on outgoing email from the Commons. However, if GC or CUNY servers are regularly spamming wordpress.com emails, it might be that Jetpack is no longer the best choice. Can you please think about what other options exist?

He replies "Thank you, Boone. Yea, I understood that GC IT controls the whitelist, so I was hoping that SubScribe2 would be reliable because we use it for an internal intranet and email notifications of new posts have been reliable for the ~10 staff members who receive them. We are able to insert an internal GC email address in the from field, so messages don't get caught in the spam filter. I will try and populate SubScribe2 again if Colin & Scott are not able to suggest an alternative.

Again, appreciate your support."

Hello, earlier this year in #19680 I posted a couple of newsletter alternatives post-Tinyletter, but as Boone says here, the subscription or email notification of new posts functionality is different and those alternatives don't cleanly apply.

I would recommend attempting to populate Subscribe2 again, especially if Stephen is already using it for another purpose successfully. Should Subscribe2 fail again, we can try to find another solution. Does Stephen have a budget available for this? Unfortunately, the trend in this space seems to be toward paid services for the more reliable and functional products.

Also, if the email recipients are members of the site (i.e. subscribers) there are other plugins that might work better than subscribe2, for example https://wordpress.org/plugins/bnfw/

I saw Stephen's reply below to the help email. After our discussion on the community call yesterday about our resource limitations, I think we need to tell him we aren't in a position to provide SQL support or troubleshoot what is more of an issue with this 3rd-party plugin than with the Commons itself. We could suggest that Stephen take the issues to Subscribe2 for further support.

The resistance to devoting budget is also disappointing. We might have to explain that our core Commons team can only support newsletter functionality so much, given its inherent complications, leaving additional features/reliability to 3rd party and premium plugins. This one has an add-on that seems to do exactly what is desired, and is around $100 a year (maybe less).

https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/automated

There is also the route of using site members (i.e. subscribers) to send newsletters, though I suspect that their current list has non-Commons members or they would like to have that option.

"Thanks, Colin. I just tried again. The first time it imported 6, the next time ~106 and I tried a third time and it loaded 204. It is smart enough, sometimes knowing not to import because of potential duplicates because I get this message:

Some emails were not processed, the following are already Registered Subscribers:

However, I nevertheless see duplicates. Moreover, I was not able to import any more on a 4th attempt.

Maybe I send you the text file and someone can run som SQL after flusing the table once again?

I assume we do not have a budget and it's so difficult to purchase at through the GC."

Let me get in touch with Stephen separately to ask about budget

Stephen said his only hesitation in asking about paying for it is whether we've used or tested the plugin. We haven't, right?

If you mean this Newsletter plugin that I suggested, we haven't tested it, but they do have a 30-day no questions asked money back policy:

https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/premium