31 May
2018
31 May
'18
2:56 p.m.
Hi,
On 05/31/2018 11:46 AM, Guillaume Delhumeau wrote:
Notifications application is almost ready to replace
the Activity Stream's
UI. The only remaining thing is the display
of the messages from the Message Stream in the Notifications.
We have made a quick brainstorming with Caty and Vincent, and here is our
conclusions.
1/ We think it make sense to display user messages in the notifications
because it is typically what notifications
are made for: pop-up important information concerning what the user cares.
In the past, we decided to disable the
Message Stream by default because messages were lost in the Activity
Stream. But in the case of the notifications, users
can chose what they want to receive so there is less chance to miss
messages in the middle of thousand of events.
2/ Like all other types of notification, there should be a button in the
notification settings of each user to decide to
enable or disable these messages in the notifications. It should be enabled
by default.
3/ We should add the "send message" gadget in the "alert" menu (via
an UIX)
so it's easy to find and to send messages.
4/ Provide a form to be able to reply to a personal message.
5/ Let the message stream disabled by default. Users who are used to it
will not lose the feature but we don't make it
visible for now until we make some other improvements.
This is what I am starting to implement right now with the hope it's done
for XWiki 10.5.
In the future, we should add the following features:
a/ Having a real "inbox" application (a "Message Center") to handle
all
messages.
b/ Be notified when someone mention you in a content or in a comment
(example: "@vmassol: You may want to read this
page" will trigger a notification to Vincent Massol).
c/ Handling correcty messages sent to a group if the first implementation
do not handle it (group filtering could be a problem
with SQL).
Caty, Vincent, please reply if I've forget something.
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 ?
- 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.
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 ; only to have an equivalent of a feature that we
disabled some years ago. 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.
Thanks for you time and have a great day,
Guillaume