Don't Spam Me Bro
A back-end computer glitch that occurred at around 2 a.m. on Wednesday caused 33 messages that were originally sent as long ago as September 2010 to be re-sent through the campus events listserv, generating confusion amongst students who received them, according to listserv moderator Will Hix ’12.
The campus events listserv, which boasts close to 3,800 subscribers, initially had a limit of 20 messages per day to prevent the system from overloading, Hix said. The listserv would shut down after 20 messages were sent in one day and put messages on hold to allow a manager to approve them before the system is reset.
"What has been happening over the course of the last month is that the listserv has become a lot more popular and lots of groups are using it," Hix said. "On some days, we would get more than a couple dozen messages going through the listserv, so even though they would be approved, they wouldn't be distributed to campus."
Hix contacted systems administrator and listserv manager David Avery at around 2 a.m. Wednesday to try and get messages that were held that day to be sent out by increasing the limit to 100 messages per day, he said. Although this allowed several cued messages to be sent out that morning, it also released messages that were on hold and scheduled to be sent out months ago.
After notifying the Council on Student Organizations about the issue, Hix sent an email to the campus events listserv on behalf of COSO apologizing for the error and informing students that they could unsubscribe at any time.
So far, though, the problem has not affected the listserv's popularity, according to Hix, as only 10 or 15 people have unsubscribed. The listerv is now running smoothly, Hix said
The listserv began spring of last year as a solution to campus-wide blitz lists that individual organizations had to use.