31 May
2018
31 May
'18
4:42 p.m.
On 31 May 2018, at 16:23, Clément Aubin
<aubincleme(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/31/2018 03:18 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Did I say we should not think about it?
Also as I wrote you can send to a group and to everyone too so yes you can send to
multiple people.
Hi Clement,
This is not supported ATM (see
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Message%20Stream%20App…) so
no issue FTM. You can only send messages to a given user, to a group or to everyone.>
I don’t see a problem to add this feature later on if we need it.
I'm here describing my own usage of collaborative platforms or social
networks. If it wasn't supported before today, maybe we should think
about it, because usually, people with only one friend to talk to are
rare. Having multiple conversation is something that we should at least
think about. On 31 May 2018, at 14:56, Clément Aubin
<aubincleme(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
All others: if you have any recommendation or counter argument, please post
it quickly :)
I don't have a good knowledge of the "old" message stream
implementation, however, I'm concerned about the ability of the
notification system to act as a messaging center.
- When working on multiple documents, I might end up talking with
multiple people at the same time. What would happen to the notification
center ? Would I have a composite event with all of my conversations in
it, or one composite notification per user I'm talking with, which would
probably fill most of the notification center ? Also, as you mentioned it in the end of your previous
mail, "if we do
nothing now, nothing will happen for at least 1 year", what makes you
think that we'll have the time to improve the feature later on, even if
we do need it ?
Ok so we have a big disagreement:
* You say “displaying notifications in the proposed way is bad thing and there’s no use
case for it”
* I say “‘displaying notifications for those who want to send messages to a single person,
to a group or to everyone is better than not being able to do it”.
Also note that it’s disabled by default ATM so by default you get what you want, i.e.
nothing!
- When
being in a wiki, I might end up staying 1, 2 hours or more on the
same page, either to edit it or to read it and refer to it from time to
time. The messaging feature of the notification is interesting here if
and only if we have the ability to auto-refresh the notification center
every X seconds / minutes to check for new events or, in this case, new
messages. AFAIK, this feature isn't in place for now.
I don’t see this related at all to messaging. You have the same problem for any kind of
notifications. This is related to live notifications and something generic for the
notifications feature.
I don’t agree with "The messaging feature of the notification is interesting here if
and only if we have the ability to auto-refresh the notification center every X seconds”.
Again I don’t see why this is related only to messaging and also I find it more useful to
have messaging than nothing (which is what you propose). I can imagine plenty of use cases
where it’s still useful to have messaging without the auto refresh. I consider auto
refresh to be a nice improvement to have not as a "must have or there’s no value”.
If you forget to
refresh your page, you forget to get new messages. Imagine if you had to
refresh a page every time you wanted to see a new message on IRC.
This is exactly what you do with your email and I don’t think you can say that email is
useless…
All in
all, I'm very concerned that we try to ship a half finished
feature that cannot be used for real collaboration and that still takes
some place in the UI ;
Maybe there’s a misunderstanding: We’re not trying to develop a messaging feature. This
feature already exists and we’re not touching this.
All that we’re doing is add the ability to display messages in the notification UI if
some messages are present in the Event Stream table.
This feature already exists today and not doing this would be to remove a feature that is
now interesting to have thanks to the replacement of the AS by the Notifications UI.
only to have an equivalent of a feature that we
disabled some years ago.
We disabled it for 2 reasons and not for the reasons you mentioned above:
* Because the dashboard was on the home page and several users were not using the message
sending UI and didn’t want it to take valuable space on the home page. This has been
solved by moving the dashboard to a different space
* Because you couldn’t know when someone was sending a message to you and it was hard to
check your personal AS (you had to nav to your user profile). Those 2 problems are fixed so there’s no reason
to not have it anymore.
So we're putting back something that has been disabled by default since
more than one year without giving it enough features to be usable for a
standard user (things like being able to get messages in real time, for
example). For me, it's both a waste of time, and this might even degrade
the image of XWiki as it (IMO) won't be a very useful feature. If we want to promote messaging and more user
to user interaction in the wiki, maybe we should take more time to spec
it. If we had to vote for this, I'd say -0 for now.
Yes and that’s why Caty is going to conduct a more general investigation on that.
I understand your POV and I don’t disagree with it in general. However, I feel that:
* I don’t like regressing/loosing features
* This is an opportunity to have something now. I can tell you that if we do nothing now,
nothing will happen for at least 1 year
* We’re not redoing the messaging feature, just the display part in the notif UI
* I don’t see how there would much changes even if we spend 2 years designing a new
messaging center.
* It’s not going to cost much (probably 1-2 days of work max). So at worse ,it’ll cost us
1-2 days if we had to redo everything.
* Also note that we're not changing the store or anything so even if we redo it
completely differently it doesn’t matter and we will not loose anything
* This will allow us to gather feedback from the community about needs/improvements
* We can never implement a feature in one go. We need to work iteratively. We just need
to make sure the architecture is not going to break. Since we’re not touching this part,
there’s no real risk
So I really believe that it’s more positive than negative to spend this little time to
display messages in the notif UI.
WDYT? I think that sending messages into the event stream
was kind of a bad
idea from the beginning as messages don't have the same "weight" as
other wiki events.
The event stream has nothing to do with weight. It’s a timeline thing. It’s like saying:
“having emails displayed in the order they are sent is a bad idea”.
The way even stream events are displayed is an implementation detail. They can be
filtered, grouped, etc.
I do understand that you don't like loosing
features,
but since I've known XWiki, I've never heared of the Message Stream in a
good, useful and productive way.
Then you shouldn’t care at all since it’s not going to be used and you’re not the one
implementing it. It’s also off by default.
So reading between the line, in the end you’re saying:
* We shouldn’t have a messaging feature because what we need is a chat feature
* There’s no way that people could use messages, it’s not useful
What I’m saying:
* We don't have chat feature and that’s a very large feature to develop with a
completely different architecture.
* A messaging feature is still interesting even if we have a chat feature one day. Example
use case: "send a message to everyone that the xwiki will be be upgraded tomorrow”, “
notify a group of person to review a document”, etc.
* It costs little to be back to iso feature (1-2 days) and it’s taking almost the same
amount of time just to discuss not doing it in this thread ;)
* I don’t see why messaging would be bad and affect the XWiki usage negatively. Especially
since message stream is off by default.
Thanks
-Vincent
Thanks,
Clément
[1] https://markmail.org/message/pw6wtx2lkn72rupv
> Thanks
> -Vincent
>
>>
>>> Thanks for you time and have a great day,
>>>
>>> Guillaume