[thelist] PR subscription system, how would you do it?

Stuart Young syoung at unitec.ac.nz
Thu Jul 24 06:28:09 CDT 2003


Hi,

we want to create a system where our users can manage their subscription
options and choose which types of information they would like to be
emailed to them.

Something like this:
http://www.beehive.govt.nz/lists/index.cfm

how would you do it?

We currently have a documents library with about 10 different types of
documents written by 9 different authors categorised in about 60 topic
categories.
http://www.greens.org.nz/docs/
Ideally whenever a new document was added and categorised, it would be
emailed to all the users that have signed up for that category.

We currently have a database of 10000's of people who have expressed an
interest in certain topics
http://www.greens.org.nz/office/interest_areas_form.htm 
but this only allows them to express an overall yes/no for emails. There
is no way that they can choose different options for each one, say

* all documents on Drug Law Reform as soon as they are published
* a weekly digest of all Security and Intelligence documents
* only send me PRs for Tertiary Education, not other types of document
* register my interest in Transport, Climate Change and Trade but don't
send me anything on these.

etc etc

A document could be categorised in multiple topic categories, so there
would need to be some sort of checking so that if a user had signed up
to receive docs from multiple categories that they didn't receive the
same doc twice.

We would like the users to be able to check what information they have
given us and make changes to it. The database is currently in Access.
The documents library is currently written in ASP.

So how would you go about this?

cheers

Dr Stuart Young,       +64 (0)9-815 4321 Ex 8656
<syoung at unitec.ac.nz>     
Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Technology,
UNITEC Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

"Have I lost faith in Microsoft? Yes, completely, I no 
longer care or believe any claim or announcement they 
make. I am not interested in their latest and greatest 
version of anything."



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