On Our Mind: BuzzIn Messages

Du 'Dufucius' Xiaokang / The Bulletin

Emporia State provides a campus e-mail address for every student and faculty member. The system includes junk mail filtering service and is made to be fairly secure.

However, it seems lately that most of the excessive e-mailing isn’t coming from spammers of junk mail companies--it’s coming from the university itself.

The BuzzIn system offers a method of reaching all students and faculty via e-mail through it’s BuzzIn Announcement feature.

This can be a very helpful tool in many circumstances. However, to be helpful it needs to be used properly.

The current system sends BuzzIn announcements to all e-mail addresses often disregarding whether the e-mail actually applies to the recipient or not.

A number of students have complained about having received multiple messages in one day which are addressed to faculty and staff and not to students. On the other hand, a number of faculty members have received e-mails which were meant for students.

For the system to be truly effective there should be a separation distinguished between the different messages and the messages should only go to those the message is intended for.

This system shouldn’t be too difficult to devise. After all, if BuzzIn is so advanced then it should have a feature which allows administrators to discern between different types of users and direct messages to the proper people.

Overall the message system in place is not a huge problem. It’s simply an inconvenience and an annoyance for people who log on to find that they have 50 messages from BuzzIn Announcements which do not pertain to them in any way.

While we don’t believe it should be the top priority for things that need to be changed on campus, we do believe it should be given some serious consideration--especially when the time comes to evaluate the technological systems in place on campus.