Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Fri, 08/16/2013 - 20:46
I'm getting saturated in AAVSO text messages - 50 in the past 48 hours and at $.20 cents each, this is getting expensive.
I keep asking where I can turn off the messages and can't get any help. I've gone the the subscriptions and set everything to be "once daily" but that doesn't help. I can't find anyplace to remove my cell phone number. I still want the emails but not text messages. Can anyone help?
I'm just replying here so that folks can learn from this experience. As a community, we help each other on everything, not just photometry.
We now live in a world where information can come at us in a multitude of different ways, and usually we think this is a good thing. But when information comes at us in a way we don't understand, it can be confusing for everyone. And we have so many different pieces of information going out that sometimes even the information provider - originally in this case the AAVSO - can be confused as well!
First, the Abstract: The text messages coming to the observer's phone were coming there due to how his Twitter account was set up. The solution was to turn off forwarding AAVSO tweets to his phone number, or to take his phone number off his Twitter account. This had nothing to do with the AAVSO, per se, but with the person's Twitter account set up.
Always take a hard look at the information you are receiving. You may not be receiving it from where you think you are. Finding the information source these days may not be obvious.
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The Article: Gordon sent a complaint to have alerts stop coming to his phone. We don't have alerts or special notices coming to the phone per se. The only thing we, at the AAVSO, had coming to phones, traditionally, were mynewsflashes. Aaron had written mynewsflash years ago and I had maintained a bit of it. Will, our webmaster, had recently completely rewritten it under a Django framework for the website. I hadn't been involved, but with Will away on vacation, I dove into the code, and figured out his database. I found my mynewsflashes, and Mike Simonsen's, so I knew I was on the right track. I found nothing for Gordon. Worse, this new mynewslfash didn't send texts to phones. Via computer you can send messages to a special email address for a phone subscriber and they will go to texts on their phone. Will wasn't doing that.
I made sure the old version of mynewsflash wasn't running anywhere and it wasn't, so we had no idea how Gordon was getting these mynewsflashes or how to stop them! I asked Gordon to send me what he was getting in the hopes that I could figure out how they were being addressed to him. Gordon sent me a couple of texts. At this point he was being overwhelmed with about 17 a day, and he was paying for the darn things!
When I got the texts forwarded, I realized they were tweets. Now I don't use Twitter normally. This response will show you folks that Stephen King and Tom Clancy taught me how to write. I can't say "Hello" in less than 5,000 words. 140 characters?? Please!! I went to Mike Simonsen who has made himself our Social Media Maven and he agreed it was tweets sent by Twitter, but didn't quite know how they were reaching Gordon's phone. But we knew it wasn't anything we had set up at the AAVSO. Lauren Rosenbaum, who was partially listening and uses Twitter, knew the actual Twitter account setup involved and clued us in.
So the lesson here is to take a good look at what you're receiving because its source, nowadays, may not be obvious. I also thought this would be a good way of giving you folks a snapshot of the teamwork involved in solving a problem here at HQ. Everyone brings something to the table, no matter what their actual job descriptions are!