CUNY Academic Commons

I've asked IT about the timing and will update this ticket when I have more info.

Thanks, Marilyn -- as Matt told us, the issue is that the forwarding continues unless a student does not register, in which case it stops. And I am worried that a fair number of students have an occasional semester where they don't register.

I am going to ask IT if there is a way to check addresses -- so that, say, if the CAC team could pull all accounts that are both GC and grad students, GC IT could share the new addresses with us

I am pretty sure that everyone who had a GC address kept the same prefix for their new gradcenter address. History has a student named Megan Brown whose email went from MBrown5@gc.cuny.edu to MBrown5@gradcenter.cuny.edu even though there were no longer 4 other MBrowns

If we have a 100% guarantee from IT that every xxx@gc.cuny.edu corresponds to an xxx@gradcenter.cuny.edu address, then it's easy to do a search and replace.

If we have anything less than a 100% guarantee, then I think we need to prompt users to take action themselves.

We'll never have that guarantee because student addresses have changed to the gradcenter.cuny.edu address, while faculty addresses have stayed on gc.cuny.edu

My thought was to do a search (possibly on the frontend) for people associated with the GC as institution and grad student as role, and to go from there.

Oh right, ugh.

I would be extremely wary of relying too heavily on user-reported Role data. This data could be incorrectly entered, out of date, or not present at all.

How's this for a plan: For all gc.cuny.edu users, show a prompt on next visit that says something like "The Graduate Center has recently migrated student accounts from the gc.cuny.edu domain to gradcenter.cuny.edu. If your email has changed, we can change your Commons profile for you. [No, keep mgold@gc.cuny.edu] [Yes, change to mgold@gradcenter.cuny.edu]"

The one issue with an alert is that members would only see if if they logged in. However, members may not be able to log in if they do not have a current email address connected to the Commons.

This is a fair point. Maybe we could build something into the password reset process that would require a similar yes/no question? I'm pretty strongly against doing any automatic changes based on Role data.

Boone Gorges wrote:

This is a fair point. Maybe we could build something into the password reset process that would require a similar yes/no question?

Interesting. I am starting a related ticket; you should see it soon

I'm pretty strongly against doing any automatic changes based on Role data.

Just so that we are clear, the plan I was hoping for would go like this:

- we use role data to build a list of users we think are both grad students and members using gc.cuny.edu addresses
- we share that list with GC IT, which runs a comparison against its records, and sends us updated gradcenter.cuny.edu addresses for students who are confirmed to have switched
- we make changes in the database

so, the second step, performed by IT, would be the validation, and we would only change addresses of students whom IT has confirmed 1) are grad students, and 2) have updated email addresses

Note: I do not yet have IT's agreement on this plan.

IT has told me that if we can given them a list of all members with gc.cuny.edu addresses, they can tell us which ones have changed to gradcenter.cuny.edu addresses.

Excellent. I will send you the email addresses privately. Once they're processed, send them back to me and I'll make the changes. Let's leave this ticket open to track progress.

Great -- thanks, Boone.

Hi Boone,

Just wanted to give you a nudge on this

Hi Matt - It looks like I sent you the file on March 12, via email. I've just sent it again - check your inbox :-D

Thanks, Boone. Did you send it to gmail or GC? And what was the subject of the email?

I sent it to your Gmail address. The subject line is "Fwd: [CUNY Academic Commons - Feature #3657] Create alert for GC email addresses" (there may be an extra "Fwd" in there for the one I just sent)

Hmmm.. . .the email does not appear to have arrived either time you sent it.

check that -- just found it in the gmail spam folder . . .

Urp, sorry about that.