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Notifications block - how does unsubscribe work?

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Notifications block - how does unsubscribe work?

Postby leahv » Tue Jun 24, 2014 2:34 pm

Hi there:

We have recently reviewed announcement correspondence that goes out from OJS in light of the new Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation. One of the practices we would like to advise our hosted journals on is to include 'unsubscribe' instructions at the top of all announcement correspondence from the journals whether the communications are commercial in nature or not (and when it is commercial, that text really must be there).

This is easy with ToC alerts to registered Readers, as the prepared email can be modified to include instructions for getting oneself off the list. With the notifications block signup this is not clear to me. This is important, because Announcements can be sent out if a user agrees to the notifications option, and Announcements are where the commercial emails originate (e.g. here is a conference and it costs this much to attend, here are some print back issues for purchase etc). In testing the feature, it seems that the only way a user can remove themselves from the notifications list is to refer back to the original email received when they signed up for notifications to unsubscribe. We are running 2.4.2 and for me this email looks like this (I've swapped in general terms for the specifics in square brackets):

---------------------------------------------
You have signed up to receive notifications from [Our hosting service]

Please click on this link to confirm your request and add your email
address to the mailing list:
http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/[insert journal name here]/notification/confirmMailListSubscription/26132703353a0b3635ba76

If you wish to stop receiving notification emails, please go to
http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/[insert journal name here]/notification/unsubscribeMailList/26132703353a0b3635ba76
and enter your email address and password.

Your password for disabling notification emails is: {$password}

----------------

So, I'm confused. There is no password established at the point that someone submits their email to that block to sign up for notifications. Also, let's assume the person who signed up lost this original email. How would a journal manager remove that person's email from the list that receives notification block emails? Finally, is there any way for a journal manager to know what kind of announcements a user has signed up for?

I think I am just not really understanding how the notifications block works, but especially so for users who don't have an account with the system and have just signed up using the standard notifications block 'subscribe' form.

Thanks in advance for your advice on this one. LV
leahv
 
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Nov 28, 2008 10:53 am

Re: Notifications block - how does unsubscribe work?

Postby jmacgreg » Thu Jun 26, 2014 11:40 am

Hi LV,

You've (unfortunately) summed up the issue with the notifications/mailing list subscription block. I've written up some instructions on how to best comply with the Canadian anti-spam legislation, which you can view here. We're also going to include better mechanisms for users to manage subscriptions, incl. the mailing list subscription option, in the next stable versions of OJS and OCS. You can find a bug report concerning the anti-spam issues here, to which you can CC yourself for future updates.

OJS 2.4.5 will be released this summer, at which point users will have these better mechanisms available to them. We'll try and release a patch for older versions of OJS as well - at least for those on the 2.4.x line.

If you have any questions, please let us know either here or (perhaps even better) on the bug report!

Cheers,
James
jmacgreg
 
Posts: 4191
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2006 10:50 am

Re: Notifications block - how does unsubscribe work?

Postby leahv » Mon Jun 30, 2014 10:58 am

Thanks James, this is really helpful. Sorry I did not notice the FAQ instructions before I posted. Though we do intend to upgrade to 2.4.5. as soon as we can, it would really be great to have something for 2.4.x.
leahv
 
Posts: 36
Joined: Fri Nov 28, 2008 10:53 am

Re: Notifications block - how does unsubscribe work?

Postby jmacgreg » Wed Jul 02, 2014 7:35 pm

Hi LV,

Thanks for the response! And you didn't notice the FAQ entry because it didn't exist until after you posted. :D I've taken a pretty close read of the documentation on the legislation, but if you have any further thoughts/questions, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Sincerely,
James
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Posts: 4191
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2006 10:50 am


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