On 05/31/2018 03:18 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi Clement,
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 ?
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.
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 ?
- 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”.
Yes, this is a feature that is also nice to have for all kind of
notification, however, this is what I mean by "shipping a half finished
feature" : messaging is something done in real time. 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.
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).
Actually, I would be interested to know the other reasons for disabling
the Message Stream some time ago. In the original message ([1]), this
was the only point mentionned, but maybe Nicolas had more reasons.
Those 2 problems are fixed so there’s no reason to not
have it anymore.
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?
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.
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. 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.
Thanks,
Clément
[1]
https://markmail.org/message/pw6wtx2lkn72rupv
Thanks
-Vincent
> Thanks for you time and have a great day,
>
> Guillaume