Discussion: How to make past unsubscribes visible in the UI
Edit: Title changed to reflect discussion, which has gone in a different (better) direction.
Sometimes, a contact unsubscribes from a group and is later re-added to the same group. After this happens, we no longer have any record of the contact unsubscribing as their group status has been updated to Added with the added date.
It would be useful to be able to check when a contact unsubscribed in order to troubleshoot (are contacts being re-added to groups they have unsubscribed from?), to confirm with the contact manually that they wish to be in a newsletter subscription group and generally to be able to say that the org has a record of the contact unsubscribing. Similarly, if a contact unsubscribes from a group that is later deleted, then there is no longer any record of their having unsubscribed.
So, I propose to add an activity whenever a contact unsubscribes from a group by email:
- Add an activity type: Unsubscribe.
- Whenever a contact unsubscribes by email, add an activity of this type with the subject indicating the group unsubscribed from and the mailing from which they unsubscribed: "Unsubscribed from GROUP via MAILING".
For similar record keeping purposes, I think it would make sense to do the same with opt outs, with a new Opt out activity type, with subject: "Opted out from bulk emails via MAILING".
In theory, these changes would be viewable in the change log, but that's only if you have logging turned on and are willing to trawl through many change log entries to try to find the relevant one. An activity would be much more usable and is in line with many other actions that are recorded as activities (like changes to recurring contributions, contributions themselves, membership status changes, event registrations and changes, etc).