[Marilyn Weber]

Hi all – We’ve decided to replace our Program listserv with a more functional Commons Group. But can I really only invite 7 people at a time? Is there no way around this? Any advice is more than welcome. Thanks!

– Marilyn Weber
Assistant Program Officer, PhD Program in History
212-817-8430

[Scott Voth (he/him)]

Hi Marilyn – I took a quick look at this and it seems there are two ways to invite members. The first involves checking off names of existing members, and when you are done, just clicking on the invite. The second is to provide email addresses, which I think is the one you are probably using? It is hard to test this (don’t want to send out a lot of bogus invites) but are you only able to enter 7 emails there? I know that the input box can be expanded (see icon on bottom right corner). Let us know. Thanks!

[Marilyn Weber]

Correct – I’m emntering email addresses. Yes, I see the input box is expandable but it rejects my attempts. I’ve attached a screen shot. Thanks for replying!

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[Raymond Moy]

I was having problems with the number of invites last July and technical support told me that the 7 limit was put in to prevent the use of this page for spamming – ” This was set up to ensure that the Send Invites page wouldn’t be used to spam CUNY users. “

[Matthew K. Gold (he/him)]

Hi All,

Ray is correct — we instituted the limit to prevent possible use of the
page to spam users. But you can invite more than 7 people total — you just
have to send batches of 7 invites apiece.

We’d be happy to rethink this setup/policy based on feedback from this
group, so please let us know your thoughts.

Best,

Matt

On Oct 2, 2012 10:25 AM, “commons.gc.cuny.edu” <
wordpress@commons.gc.cuny.edu> wrote:

[Marilyn Weber]

I’m all for anti-spam tactics, but limiting to 7 really seems extreme. I’d imagine these groups may be increasingly used by classes and for events. Having only seven participants is not desirable in either of those cases. Could it be raised? Perhaps to 20? I know you you do it in batches, but here I’m looking at 24 batches – raising it to 20 would make it 8 batches. Imagine if English decides to use the Commons for a student forum – they’d have to do it in 58 batches!

[Keith Miyake]

I’m not sure what the purpose of the cap really is. If it’s to prevent bots, there are better ways of doing so such as a simple annoying captcha. And really, doesn’t the person doing the inviting need to be a member of the commons already? Probably with a cuny.edu email address attached to their account?

My real concern would be that generating large numbers of emails from the commons would bump the spam rating for the commons in general, which is probably already a concern given other available methods for sending notifications, newsletters, etc. So perhaps a solution would be to lift the cap, limit mass invites to cuny.edu accounts, and then maybe send a notification to an admin on batch invites above some threshold like 50 emails, just as a cautionary flag.

[Matthew K. Gold (he/him)]

In response to feedback from this group, we have set a new maximum of 20 email invites per request. Thanks very much, Marilyn and others, for your thoughts on this.

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