CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Ray --

Here's a comment from UserVoice :

When an announcement is shared with a large group and email notifications are sent to users, sometimes their auto-reply sends a message back which inevitably gets posted to the thread on Commons. Is there any way to fix this?

As I noted on the thread, I think this will be hard to prevent, but here's an idea:

What if we analyzed a whole bunch of email "away" messages (many of them have bounced to the Commons email account, so it wouldn't be too hard to gather them) and did some analysis of their language. I'm thinking of some word-frequency analysis that would show us which words are used most often -- perhaps words like "vacation" and "away" and "email". If we designed a filter, of sorts, for RBE that messages would run through to see whether they met some criteria (having 2 or more of those frequently used words, for instance), we could flag the message. Just so that we wouldn't be inadvertently preventing false positives from posting, we could require that some kind of confirmation link be clicked to actually post the message.

What do you think? Too complicated/hard to construct? Or might this (or some other way) help lead us towards a way of addressing this problem.

Lots to consider here, of course, including how much time it would take to construct something like this and whether it's worth the time . . . .

Looking forward to your thoughts.