Mark,
I'd like to maintain a clear semantic and operational distinction
between
messages, which post to the group's archive and
are sent to members in accordance to the
Email Delivery
and
Advanced Preferences panes of their Subscription
settings, and
notices which do not appear in the group's
archive and are sent to members based on events and other factors
(including, for moderators, the
Notifications pane of
their Subscription).
By those definitions the existing Calendar notifications
(#cal-invite, #cal-reminder, and #cal-notice) are actually
messages.
- Calendar invites. They have the hashtag #cal-invite, and
the emails are sent to the group. People can mute those, and
now they can also turn them into a notification. The invites
still get sent to the group and still appear in the archives
and people can still reply to them.
So when you say "turn them into a notification" here you mean
something different - you mean make them available through the
notification viewing system (web/app). Presumably they would also
receive them by email unless they muted the associated hashtag.
I think this hybrid situation for calendar events (being both
messages
and now possibly
notifications) is probably appropriate.
They may be the unique example of a notification that ought to be
sent to the entire membership.
- As I add additional group notifications (like some
database/file/photo changes that people have been asking
for),
Wiki!
- that means more notifications will appear in the group
archives.
Or maybe not - we can argue about whether
Notify Members
on Upload File and those new ones ought to be treated as hybrids
like the calendar events. Maybe it is time to make them
notifications
available to members only as an email (unless muted) or in the
web/app notification viewer. Or maybe that choice is given to the
group admins by allowing a new
No Archive hashtag option.
Users have been able to mute hashtags
since the beginning, which means no email. Now, also make it so
that users can check a box to turn a hashtag into a web/app
notification.
I'm not at all sold on this.
I think it may be annoying/confusing to have the notification
controls lost amid the sea of message hashtags. I'd rather have
the list of them in one place, one easily read list, with the
checkboxes to
Show in Notification and
Mute in Email
as columns to that list (ok, maybe also Duration for Mute). I
specifically would not want to have to find and click on a button
for each one among the difficult to scan hashtag tiles and go
to a confirmation page just to change it, as one
currently does for changing the Mute status of a hashtag. Yuck.
So, if the Hashtags page had a separate tab on it for the
notification-control hashtags, and the items on that tab were
presented as a list rather than an array of tiles, I'd be much
happier with this.
(Someone is bound to think of it, so I'll just say it: perhaps
tiles or list should be a viewing option on both tabs of this
page.)
It would also be fair to say that I don't like the idea of
notification controls as hashtags at all, and I'd rather see the
list of them as a new tab in the Subscription page - since they
are individual and not group settings. Though I do see that
attraction to try and leverage the power of all those hashtag
settings for notifications.
This has an advantage that people could now get notifications
on any group hashtag as well.
Oh. Now I really don't like this. Unless maybe there's still the
separate tab for event-driven hashtags/notifications versus
ordinary message hashtags. Or a list filter at least. And the
ability to view the hastags in a compact list rather than tiles.
- I haven't thought about whether we'd need some sort of
aggregation option.
I think "yes". Perhaps a control much like
Email Delivery
for messages, but specifically pertaining to notifications. It
could go in a panel at the top of the Notifications tab of the
Hashtags (or Subscription) page.
There may also be a need, at a finer level, to consolidate
notifications if a person is making multiple sequential actions of
the same type (like file or photo uploads).
- I haven't thought about how to decide what appears in the
new Notifications feed.
I'm confused. Isn't this whole discussion about how a user chooses
what to be notified about? Or do you mean something else by
"feed"?
Shal
(I may have started rambling, it is getting much too late.)