or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk


Keeping Constant Contact Clean

   November 16th, 2016 Brian Herzog

Earlier this year, when the woman who used to be in charge of all our email newsletter retired, I became the library's primary contact for our Constant Contact account. This meant I started getting the weekly emails about how many new subscribers we had, confirmation that messages were sent out, and I was the one to get the billing notices.

All of that is fine, except that after just a couple weeks, our bill jump. A lot. And I had no idea why.

After a little digging and a few phone calls to Constant Contact, it turned out that the number of contacts in our account had grown so much that we crossed into the next higher pricing tier. We were now over 10,000 contacts - that sounds great, but the price different was tremendous, and wasn't something we had budgeted for nor could we afford.

After the dust settled, the obvious occurred to me: Chelmsford's population is about 33,000 - there's no way that enough people in town could have signed up for our email newsletter to grow our contacts list that much.

So I started looking at the weekly new subscribers notification more closely, and notice something - see if you see the same thing I did:

ccnewsubs

To me, all of these looked like fake email addresses. Not just the .ru, .pl, .top, .site, etc, but even the yahoo.com accounts looked bogus. And we were getting 100-200 new subscriptions a week, so yes, it makes sense then how we could grow from a sensible subscriber base to over 10,000.

So now of course, I needed to figure out how to delete all these fake addresses out of our account to bring the total number of contacts down so Constant Contact would drop us down to the lower pricing tier again. Their Customer Service people I spoke with were friendly, helpful, and understanding, and gave us a grace period to get things under control.

I hadn't used Constant Contact much before this, but I quickly became familiar with their Contact Management area and deleting contacts. My first strategy was just to search for things like "*.ru" and "*.pl" and delete any address that came up, because I sincerely doubt that we have any patrons in Russia or Poland. I built myself quite a list of top-level domains to search for and delete every week, and even though it helped, it still required a lot of of my time.

The first day I started working on this, I deleted something like 2,000 contacts. That was a good start and gave us some breathing room to stay below 10,000, but I knew there were lots of other junk addresses in there that I needed to figure out how to eliminate.

I also wanted to stop the flow of new signups. I talked to Constant Contact again, but they said there was no way to block signups by country or domain. They said all I could really do was require First Name and Last Name during signup, and also use "confirmation opt-in" (where patrons must click a link in an email sent to them after they filled out our web form before they are actually subscribed to the list). I did turn on the first name/last name requirement, but didn't want to use "confirmation opt-in." That extra step annoys me, and it bugged me that real patrons would have to suffer (and possibly not get signed up) because of the jerks out there. Not to mention, there is no guarantee that this would keep the jerks out.

So I kept looking in the Contact Management section for something that might help. At one point I tried figuring out where these fake signups were coming from - we only have one signup form on our website, and that's it. No Facebook form, no other apps, nothing, but I figured these fake accounts must be coming from some kind of script somewhere.

On the Advanced Search screen, I saw one of the options was "Contact Source:"

ccadvancedsearchsource

That made me think that if I could just figure out the source, I could easily search for those and delete them. Nice.

Oh, and then on list of contacts, I noticed there was a way to change the view, and the second option included the source. Ha - it's all coming together now.

ccviewoptions

After skimming through pages of our contacts, I noticed something: the source for the real contacts were either "Added by you" or "Website sign-up form." The source for everything that looked like a fake address was "Embedded JMML."

I had no idea what "Embedded JMML" or where it was to be abused like this, but at least there was some commonality. Now all I had to do was an Advanced Search for Source=Embedded JMML and everything is fine.

Except: Embedded JMML was not one of the options in the Source dropdown box in Advanced Search. Arrgh.

But, I think I solved it anyway. Using a combination of Advanced Search fields, I was able to filter out all good records, and so the results were only records with the Embedded JMML as a Source:

cccustomsearch

And there were THOUSANDS of them. I skimmed through pages of the contacts to make sure no real addresses slipped through, but they all looked fake.

So I selected them all, braced myself, and deleted 4,000 contact from our account. Whew. At least now we're back down to a realistic number, and they all seem like legitimate addresses.

I contacted Constant Contact once again, asking if they can block the "Embedded JMML" as a source for signups, or at least tell me where these signups were originating. At first all answers were no, but the support person who got my ticket really stayed with it, and convinced the development team to look at adding this as a feature. Which is great. For awhile I was beginning to think it was a big Constant Contact conspiracy to make it impossible to manage our contact list, because their pricing structure is set up to charge us more for high numbers of contacts - but that seems crazy even to me.

I know this is kind of dumb, but it really was a problem. And oddly, I didn't see anything on the internet about other people experiencing this same issue, so maybe we're just unlucky. Still, I thought it was kind of interesting and wanted to share.

So, the end result of all of this is that I still have to spend five minutes each week setting up this Advanced Search and deleting all the JMML signups, but at least it's a functioning method to get what I want, it keeps our contact list accurate and clean, and patrons don't have to jump through unnecessary hoops to get the library's email newsletter. Maybe that's the best I can hope for.



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Reference Question of the Week – 8/10/14

   August 16th, 2014 Brian Herzog

Rolling Stone on microfilmA patron came into our branch library and told the staff that she participated in a "Reading Olympics" program at the library as a kid, in 1980 "or sometime when she was in school," and wanted to know if there a photo in the newspaper. She thought she remembered seeing one, of a group shot of all the participants. Our branch doesn't have much for local history resources, so the question was transferred to me at the main library.

We do have newspaper microfilm from those years, but I'm reluctant to start searches like that with such a vague date reference. However, the library has done a great job for decades of keeping scrapbooks of all library-related news clippings, flyers, newsletters, and things like that, so that was where I started. I flipped through the scrapbooks from 1979-1981, but sadly didn't see anything related to a Reading Olympics. Lots of other stuff though, which made me think that the Reading Olympics didn't happen at the public library.

It's possible it was a school or school library program, or with the Scouts or some other group, just not the public library. I called the branch back and gave them the news, and also that if the patron wanted to come in to use the newspaper microfilm I can help get them started.

I felt bad about not finding what they were looking for, but, as often happens with research, I found other interesting things. One was the Winter 1980 library newsletter, with an article about buying a microfilm machine and microfilm collection.

This caught my eye because we're buying a new microfilm machine this year (the second since this one in 1980, but the first I've purchased). Back then, the machine and collection cost $5000; this year the ScanPro 2000 we're getting is about $7000. Also back then, printing cost $0.10; our current price is $0.15. Inflation!

Other interesting articles just on the cover of the newsletter are:

  • the library is advertising for customers for its own print shop
  • the library serves as a carpool center

Two great ways to be a community center. Nice job, 1980 Chelmsford Library!



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