Hi Shal,

On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 02:12 AM, Shal Farley wrote:

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/.

As are the file upload notifications. We've already got this mix of messages and notifications. What that also means is that the message archive is also the activity feed for the group, the place where a member can go to see everything that has happened in the group (yes, ignoring for the moment notifications that do not yet exist, like wiki updates). For better or worse, this is also how Facebook Groups is structured. I think the concept of an activity feed is important for the group, and if we end up pulling all the notifications out of the message archive, then I think we would need to create a new activity feed view somewhere.

• 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.

Yes, that's correct. Muting would just be another form of notification control.

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.

I've added a new list view to the group hashtag page, and that preference is remembered automatically. I'm definitely open to suggestions for how to better structure that page should we go the hashtags-for-notifications route, including adding bulk operation controls.

I have tried to think of other ways to do notifications, and I have been unable to come up with anything better or more straightforward. Take #cal-invite messages, for example. If the notification and hashtag muting settings are separate (and in separate areas of the site), you'd end up with some duplicate functionality. If I want nothing to do with #cal-invite messages, I'd have to mute the hashtag, and then I'd also have to go and make sure I'm not receiving any notifications about them.

Also, adding hashtags to existing moderator notifications makes it a little easier to identify which notification is which when changing the notification setting.

I'm definitely open to considering other ideas, but I haven't been able to come up with anything else that feels as straightforward as this.

Please let me know what you think.

Thanks, Mark

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 05:08 PM, "main@beta.groups.io Calendar" <main@beta.groups.io> wrote:

the email delivery database corrupted itself

That's a good trick! :-)
 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Email delivery interruption #downtime

When:
Friday, 5 June 2020
4:01pm to 4:38pm
(UTC-07:00) America/Los Angeles

Description:

During a routine software upgrade, the email delivery database corrupted itself. I had to take the email server off-line in order to restore the database. No email messages were lost.

That was an insanely good move!!! Thank you. You are awesome

Working for me in Houston now. Thanks.

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Jim

Hi,

I'm raising this as #misc as I'm not sure if it's a bug or not.

When sending a message to a member from the membership list my drop-down Notices field only lists 5 of the 14 messages I have defined.

There is a mixture of active and inactive notices, and not all notice types I have defined are listed. Are there any criteria defined to determine what should appear in the Notices list or not?

Andy

Hi Mark,

As an owner/moderator I get the options to 'Bcc: Me' and 'Bcc: All Moderators' when sending a message to a member from the membership list.  However, when performing actions like banning or rejecting a member a message is also sent to the member (if an active notice is defined} but there is no option to Bcc: anyone. Unlike rejecting a pending message, the message text is not recorded in the Activity log either so there's no proper audit trail. If we can get an option to Bcc: others (and also perhaps record the text in the Activity Log) that would be helpful.

Thanks,
Andy

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 09:15 AM, Chris Jones wrote:

FWIW ISTR that there is a similar gap in the delivery logging if a moderator sends an email to a member from the web UI; the message is logged for the member but not for the copy addressees.

I'll retract that, but the overall situation remains somewhat confusing. I have carried out a number of tests with the following results:

A Rejected Message notification is recorded in the Activity log, but does not appear in the Email Delivery History of either the person whose message was rejected or the moderators to whom it was copied. 

A Message to Member is not recorded in the Activity log but does appear in the Email Delivery History of the member concerned and those of the moderators to whom a copy is sent.

Mark; is there a reason for the different logging methods? While admitting that the time window for any investigation can be limited by only the most recent message to someone being visible, on the face of it it is a bit perverse that the different types of message are logged differently.

Is the support address still only handling queries from paid groups or has it been broadened? Obviously my problem with copies of rejection messages not being sent to me is hardly one for beta; having said that while rejection copies don't appear, copies of Messages to Members do.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice...

Chris

The Daily Summaries are working again for me. I am in the midwest US.

I understand this is a system wide issues but wanted to add my concern about the quality of resampled images. I have been on Flickr since 2006 and have enjoyed the quality of their resampling software for many years. I understand this type of software take time and money to develop, but the technology has been around for a good number of years. I also understand IO is a smaller organization than Yahoo or Flickr, but it would be sweet to see some investment in some proper photo displaying.

Thank you


Rpilla

On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 11:47 PM, J_Catlady wrote:

But the email delivery history [sic] contains only the last message received. Right? Isn't it possible other messages were received after the rejection notification?

Knowing (or at least strongly suspecting) that there was some sort of problem I checked my own and other moderators' delivery histories less than a couple of minutes after I ought to have received my own copy of the rejection notification. Of course there ws nothing logged.

I agree that the very limited snapshot of email deliveries (other than recent bounces) can be a bit frustrating but being able to carry out an immediate check was useful. What took rather longer was being able to verify that other moderators had received their copies... several hours in fact.

FWIW ISTR that there is a similar gap in the delivery logging if a moderator sends an email to a member from the web UI; the message is logged for the member but not for the copy addressees. There is not a problem if all the copies are correctly delivered but if one isn't then questions arise...

Chris  

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 12:16 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote:

(it runs in about 2 minutes for US East now instead of 1.5 hours)

Is this the same underlying code that generates Digests also?  There was a suggestion that reports of receiving 13 messages in a Digest could be due to extra messages being received between the time a Digest was triggered and the time it completed. If this is the same underlying code and it is now more efficient, the chances of 13 messages in a Digest would be reduced.

Andy

Reentrant code might let them run concurrently if one lagged.
--

Bob Bellizzi

Hi All,

I think I've tracked down and fixed the missing summaries bug. The program that generates the summaries runs every hour and generates the summaries for people with the appropriate timezone for that hour. The problem was that sometimes, especially for the US East and West coasts, those summary runs would take longer than an hour, because of the number of summaries generated. This was causing problems for the following hour (mainly midwest US people).

I've re-written the program so that it's much more efficient now (it runs in about 2 minutes for US East now instead of 1.5 hours). Hopefully this should fix the missing summaries bug.

Thanks, Mark

On Thu, Jun 4, 2020 at 03:15 PM, Chris Jones wrote:

there was no record of the rejection. A check with the other 2 revealed that they had received the notification.

But the email delivery history [sic] contains only the last message received. Right? Isn't it possible other messages were received after the rejection notification? That's actually something that drives me nuts. I wish the email delivery histories contained more "history" and not just the last email received.
 
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Mark; in Site Updates of May 9th you announced that you had rectified a bug in the recording of resent confirmation emails. I think I have found another missed logging action.

If a moderator rejects a message for some reason then the fact of that rejection is recorded in the Activity log. However, if the moderator making the rejection checks the cc All Moderators box then the copies of that rejection sent to group moderators are not recorded as emails sent to the moderators, and IMHO they ought to be if only to be consistent with the confirmation emails recording above.

What brought this to light is that fact that once again I am not getting copies of rejection notifications while the other 2 mods of the group I moderate do. My first port of call was my ISP's spam box (empty!) and the second was the email delivery histories of all 3 of us, where as mentioned above there was no record of the rejection. A check with the other 2 revealed that they had received the notification.

Could you please have a look at this so that records of rejection notification emails are included in Email Delivery Histories?

Chris

Thanks, Bruce.

The #bug comes from the editor explicitly adding those inline styles when highlighting an image and clicking right align - it even renders it correctly in the editor - with no manual code by me only to have it disappear when clicking Save. Why would the editor create styles that the site cannot support? It supported it in the preview just fine.

No donations for any of my groups. But Mark - can't I just text you twenty bucks Apple Cash once in a while? KISS?

Patti

Ominously, I just got the same "this connection is not private... impersonation" yada yada  message on my brand-new (< 1 month old) iPhone, after clicking on a wapo link that had been sent to me in an email. It happened just once but does not bode well.
--
J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu