Allowing people to modify the database directly requires trust and exposes me and visitors to potential risk. Registering with a throwaway email account in order to discard emails that I try to send you about volunteer actions is inconsistent with trust. If you don’t trust me, don’t volunteer.
Now when you volunteer, your status will become “volunteer pending”. You won’t get an email when you submit your request. At some point down the road (maybe a few days later), I may manually send you an email to make sure this is a valid email account and you do actually read things sent to it longer than the 5 minutes after you applied. No answer within a day or so will revert your account to normal status.
I’ve also changed the way things are tracked – now each time you access a page, a last visit timestamp is updated (previously it only updated when you logged in). If you’re a volunteer – but weeks go by before you visit the web site again, there is a good chance you won’t be a volunteer when you return.
Just had a few minutes and was going to verify some station web sites for you and got this message when I clicked on Needs Review:
User ( – 12508810) not authorized for this function
It says I am logged in, so I’m not sure what is happening. Maybe a temporary glitch, I will try again later.
You probably figured out by now that your account type was changed back to “normal account” after I went through and cut back the user list with editing powers. There were close to 1000 accounts that had “volunteered” but then not done anything, so you were caught up in my mass revocation of credentials. It wasn’t intentionally directed at you. My ISP contacts from 2002 will also notice their account is deleted 😉
Your account was sitting as Volunteer request, and should be back to regular volunteer.
Making that error message a bit more helpful is on my to-do list.
I’m happy to be considered “normal” and will be happy to continue helping verify station sites. I’m taking on New Jersey — for a small state we seem to have a lot of stations.
Part of the reason I’ve been pushing the notion of geographic grouping is that you’re familiar with the geography and will more readily pick up my mistakes and/or correct my wrong assumptions. If an FM station is supposed to be in Sparta and the web site is for a station in Camden, you would spot that right away. The spinoff of the NJ public radio stations to Philadelphia and WNYC is probably worth double checking to see if either have more accurate information now. Most of the information is at least 2 years out of date.
Being aware of all the little stations around you also gives a feel of what’s going on out there – the radio world doesn’t revolve only around major markets and Top-40 music. Country music and religious broadcasters are incrementally taking over.