Hi! Thanks for explaining this situation on the community call the other day. When I sent around the notes for that call, Philipp from DataverseNO replied* with the following:
(Schusie) People leaving NTU, email under "contact" goes to invalid account.
(Philipp) We also have been discussing this issue, and are considering to add by default also the contact address of the repository to all datasets.
That doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
My understanding of the "Contact" button is that it isn't tied to accounts at all. It's just a metadata field with a bit of validation to make sure a valid email address is entered. That means that it isn't tied to account notifications (the ones in the top right corner). It's more of a "fire and forget" sending of an email. So there's no workflow, if you will, built in to manage messages that have been sent to dataset contacts. There's no tracking that I know of, apart from perhaps a line in a log somewhere. If we really want a better user experience around contacting dataset owners, maybe messages should go into a queue or something. Just some idle thoughts. :)
Thanks,
Phil
p.s. With regard to people leaving your institution, I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention that a self-described Dataverse greenhorn popped into IRC the other day asking about simultaneous use of multiple login systems:
"For now I just want to check how does dataverse login system works in order to try to disign/enable simultanuous use of multiple log-in systems. I'm dataverse greenhorn, but i got a task to do so, so i need to do some research :)"