Feature #735
closed
BP Docs - Include Check-Box to Avoid Email Notifications of Minor Edits
Added by Matt Gold over 13 years ago.
Updated over 13 years ago.
Category name:
BuddyPress (misc)
Description
It looks like BP Docs sends out notifications by default when users edit group docs. This may create a lot of email. One thing that Basecamp does on its Writeboards is to include a box that says "Minor edit, don't save a new version." Perhaps we might amend this to "Minor revision, don't send email notification of edit"?
Otherwise, I'm wondering about the notification settings for Docs. Is there a way to have separate notification settings for Docs and for Group Forums? Do we want there to be?
Files
- Target version changed from 1.2.1 to 1.3
I do not want to add separate notification settings for Docs. Notification settings are already too complex and spread out throughout the site.
I should note that Docs has activity throttle built in. It will not post more than one activity item per editor per doc per hour. Thus, there is a de facto throttle on notifications as well. In other words, if you edit and save frequently, only the first one will create an activity item/notification. A second one will only be created for saves that happen more than 60 minutes later (a time limit that we can extend to whatever we want).
For this reason, I don't think that any checkbox is needed. I don't want to clutter up the interface unnecessarily. However, I'm willing to be overruled if people overwhelmingly think that the throttle isn't enough of a solution.
Didn't know about the throttle -- that does obviously change things. I'm curious to hear about what others think. We might also want to take some time to let people use the plugin and see what they think (Group for Group Admins would be a good group to ask about this). Depending upon what this group says, we might want to put this on hold for at least a little while.
- Status changed from Assigned to Hold
- Target version changed from 1.3 to Not tracked
Cool. I'm going to remove this from the 1.3 milestone and change it to Hold. We'll revisit in a few months and decide whether to close or prioritize.
- Status changed from Hold to Assigned
- Target version changed from Not tracked to 1.3
Last night, I avoided edited a group doc because I didn't want another email notification to go out (7 notifications had been sent yesterday alone). That's not good for the Commons or the for usage of Group Docs.
It seems to me that adding a small checkbox that says "Minor edit, no email notification" near the save button wouldn't clutter up the interface too much and would add some nice functionality to the system. I'd like to recommend that we move this to the 1.3 milestone.
How do others feel?
I still don't care for the idea but I'm willing to be overruled. Anyone else have thoughts about it?
I think that throttling is excellent and also that Matt's concern will be shared by others. The checkbox idea is basically what MediaWiki has too so the concept is one in use already (and it shows there may be a need for it).
Boone I understand your concern but I think I would go in favor of the checkbox (quick mockup attached).
The architectural problem I have is that the checkbox suggestion is too broad an approach. Matt's initial concern arises out of the fact that the Commons uses a group email subscription plugin, and that our members are subscribed by default to each group's firehose (ie all activity from the group). But neither of these things is the typical setup (group email is a plugin, and I hacked it to make "all activity" the default). Such a checkbox would presumably keep BP Docs from creating an activity item, but it's not activity that's causing the problem - it's our group email settings. Since activity items are used in a variety of other ways within BP, it's a bad thing to stop those activity items from being created because of these indirect concerns.
I guess this is largely a question of whether such a checkbox should be a part of the release version of BuddyPress Docs. For the reasons I give above, I am pretty much opposed to the checkbox in the release version. But I'm happy to build it as a Commons-only plugin for BP Docs.
- Status changed from Assigned to Resolved
I added a checkbox with the following text:
This is a minor edit (notifications will not be sent to subscribed group members)
When checked, no activity item is posted, and thus no notifications are sent. This is a Commons-specific plugin, found in bp-custom.php
Fixed in cdf0736
- Target version changed from 1.3 to 1.2.5
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