I have in the past sent multiple articles to contacts in ResearchGate. However, I am currently being blocked beyond sending one article to two different contacts. I have never experienced this before. Is there a way to correct this problem.
Dear Philip Gassman ,
since a while the RG policy of sending private messages within the RG community has been changed.
Unfortunately, now you can only send messages to an RG colleague when that colleague is following you...
See for example the introduction section given in the following link:
https://help.researchgate.net/hc/en-us/articles/14292678631825-Contacting-other-researchers
From my point of view it is a very serious decision which is blocking almost the whole messaging traffic; a desaster for setting up scientific contacts within the RG community.
"Is there a way to correct this problem" -- only the RG administration can solve that issue...
Best regards
G.M.
Hi Gerhard:
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the decision is an unfortunate one.
Phil
We had a short discussion on this, initiated by Rob Keller: https://www.researchgate.net/post/New_type_of_scam_New_approach_using_fake_accounts. It seems that this wave of scam was the reason for restricting the messaging function. - By the way, it seems also that the scammers use the comments function now, see my comment to previous comments in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327546437/comments.
Hi Wolfgang:
Thanks for the feedback. I am not surprised that such problems are occurring. Interestingly, I have received some requests for articles in the semi-recent past from people that I perceived had questionable motives for the requests; i.e., they listed professional info that did not seem to have anything to do with the topic of the articles. I started ignoring most of those odd requests. I am pondering now if such people might have created fake accounts?
Meanwhile, I have discovered that a ResearchGate contact does not only have to follow you in order to receive multiple files in a message, but that they also have to first respond to a message that you send to them. At least that has worked for me during the past few days.
Phil
One additional observation for anyone interested. I found that I had to have another message exchange with a "RG colleague", even though we are both following each other and had exchanged messages previously, in order to send additional files to that individual. I am finding this process < impressive and quite cumbersome. I can understand RG being concerned about fraud but they need to come up with a better system than this.
Phil
Well, I see I used some bad grammar in that previous post - should have read "I have found that I have to send another message ..." Sorry about that.