We recently discovered a gap in our autosubscription process that let nearly 700 people remain subscribed only to a regional and/or the statewide list. We have two ladders that accomplish autosubscription and welcome new subscribers. One was triggered by the act of subscribing. The other was triggered when we uploaded a list of polling place outreach subscribers.
There are other types of uploads that should have been considered. Those who join by signing a petition or registration at an event such as a tabling event or a presentation. These new people were overlooked.
I’ve changed the trigger for autosubscription to local county groups. Now, any action including an upload will trigger the ladder. Each time an action is taken the ladder will check for membership on a local list and if there is a zip code in the record it will subscribe the activist to a local group in the same manner that those who join via the website are subscribed.
There will continue to be occasional errors caused by missing or corrupted data. Those will require manual correction.
I had concerns about unintended consequences:
- would someone who had unsubscribed be resubscribed? (No, because they are still on the local list, but are flagged as unsubscribed.)
- would this try to subscribe PPO uploads? (No, because I also added logic that excludes those tagged with the PPO tag.)
- Would emails with bad address data create a logical loop? (Maybe, but the one day delay built into the process should prevent this from overtaxing the system. Also, the process is initiated by some action by us like an upload, or some action by the subscriber. Those things happen at relatively long intervals.
So now we get to see if I thought of everything… stay tuned.