Courtesy of sa.rochester.edu
The Campus Club Connection (CCC) website has undergone a facelift in recent years. The homepage now proudly displays UR colors and site navigation has been facilitated by the addition of aesthetically pleasing menus. Each club’s page displays relevant information and even includes a convenient link to automatically register for the club’s mailing list. However, the site lacks a seemingly natural and complementary feature: the ability to unsubscribe from these lists. Instead, any student who wishes to extricate him or herself from an organization must personally send a request to the club’s executive board to be removed.
At the fall and spring activity fairs, students frequently sign up for a number of clubs, hoping to explore a variety of groups. Ultimately, most of these choices do not pan out and students stop attending meetings, but still remain on the weekly mailing list. Years later they may continue to be bombarded with emails, which unnecessarily clutter their inboxes. The current solution — directly contacting a club officer asking to be removed from the mailing list — is a somewhat awkward process. It is tantamount to breaking up with the club, and it can be a little heartbreaking to send that final message. Furthermore, asking to be removed via email isn’t always enough, as club officers may occasionally forget to implement the changes manually. An automatic system on the website would offer a painless (and emotionless) alternative that would streamline the process by cutting out the middle man.
Adding this option would not adversely affect clubs, as those students who wish to be removed from the list are unlikely to participate in meetings or events anyway. Providing a system for self-removals would also remove one tedious aspect of club management, and it would help organizations get a more accurate count of their active membership, which would aid in planning events. Most importantly, this change would help limit the number of unwanted messages circulating through the University network.
It seems surprising that this feature does not currently exist. Given the present architecture of the site, this change seems like a straightforward addition to the CCC page. The system already keeps track of those who are members of a club — trying to sign up for the same club twice prompts a notice saying that the request is not allowed. Offering the ability to unsubscribe is the logical next step.
