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Work interests: research, editing, science communication
Affiliation/website: National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka
Preferred contact method: Any
Preferred contact language(s): English, German
Contact: email = researchcooperative-at-gmail-dot-com
Favourite publications: Various, and especially the open access versions of older journals with effective review systems
Founding Member
Affiliations: 1996-present: National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. 1995: Freelance editor, Kyoto. 1994: JSPS Research Visitor, Kyoto University, Kyoto. 1993: Research Visitor, Australian National University, Canberra. 1991: Visiting Researcher, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka.1990: STA Fellow, National Institute for Ornamental Plants, Vegetables, and Tea (NIVOT), Ano, Japan
Contact: National Museum of Ethnology, Senri Expo Park, Suita City, Osaka, Japan 565-8511
Biographical: Established the Research Cooperative in 2001
Favourite Publications: Various
A "confirm active members" application is needed to confirm that "active members" still exist
There is no easy way for me to verify the email addresses of "active members" who may no longer be active, because their email addresses no longer exist and they are:
(a) no longer contactable through the network, and
(b) unable to log in to delete or renew their pages because their email addresses are no longer working.
Our administration dashboard shows a list of all so-called "active members", but in fact any number of them may have changed their email addresses without updating their member data, before changing their email address.
This is something that can easily happen.
Recently I noticed that there are companies that can test and verify email addresses in bulk, without having to actually send an email and disturb the owners of the email addresses.
To use this service, I will have to manually download all member data as a csv file, delete the unnecessary data, submit the list, pay a large fee, check the results, and then manually find each individual member and delete their member accounts one by one.
Perhaps Ning could team up with one of these companies, and on behalf of all Ning networks negotiate a discount in return for integrating the service with our dashboards. Then we could "confirm active members" with one click, and decide whether to "delete all", "delete selected", "hide all" or "hide selected" from the list of results in the dashboard.
That way, we could show our truly active members member search pages that are composed of actual contactable active members, and not just the ghosts of members past.
All advice on this matter is welcome!
I wonder what of percentage of Ning networks are composed of members identified as "active" but in fact no longer active, nor contactable.
The "confirm active tool" would be a major vlaue add to all Ning networks, and would allow us to talk to advertisers seriously about using our networks for advertising.
If Ning would like to study this issue, I can offer my own network as a guinea pig for assessing the seriousness of a problem that I suspect is endemic to all our networks.
