We could turn on email bundling for the email problem, basically it utilizes delayed job queue. It sends one initial unbundled email, then send bundled emails every 4 hours

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Danny Horn <dhorn@wikimedia.org> wrote:

The new version of subscriptions and notifications has been out on Mediawiki.org for almost a week, and we're learning some interesting stuff so far. Some of it is working as intended (and therefore awesome), some of it is buggy and needs fixing, and we're getting some feedback on what's not quite working right.

I've seen some grumbles -- some on WP:Talk:Flow [1], some on MW:Talk:Flow [2], and some from people in the office -- that are basically about two things: Email notifications, and Subscribing to a board.

Subscribing to a board

We had a lot of discussion about what subscribing to a Flow board would mean. Basically, we had two options:

A) You get an Echo notification that a new topic has been created

B) You get automatically subscribed to every new topic created on the board

We hypothesized that A would work better for people who look at Echo more than their watchlist, and B would work better for people who look at their watchlist more than Echo.

We needed to pick one to try out and see how it feels, so we chose B, which was closer to the way that watching a page works right now.

What we're hearing from the feedback this week is that people are feeling spammed -- subscribed to too many topics that they're not interested in. I think it would be reasonable to switch it to A -- that would also solve the "two notifications for the same action" problem that we're currently having with one notification for "created a topic" and another for "posted the first message," which is the same thing.

So I'll talk to Erik and Benny, and anybody else who cares, and we'll figure that out. Does anyone have thoughts about it?

Email notifications

Oh, and then we also didn't pay attention to email notifications, and therefore we ruined the world and I feel moderately bad about it. We're sending one email per post on a thread, which is obviously too much.

I think the right answer there is to follow the example of watchlist emails -- send the first one, and then don't send any more until the user visits the Topic page. That's how watchlist works, and I think it's fine. I'll make a card and we should probably jump on that as soon as we can, so we stop ruining email.

I'm also interested in thoughts on that, if anyone has some.

And then we keep on Flowing. Peace out.

Danny

[1]: WP:Talk:Flow feedback -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flow#Problems_accessing_mediawiki_flow_page_-_and_too_many_Echo_notifications

[2]: MW:Talk:Flow feedback -- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:S17tpg980s0mjuvi

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