31 May
2018
31 May
'18
5:24 p.m.
I see a problem. If the message stream is disabled, the preferences buttons
about the messages are still displayed in the notification settings...
The way it works is by fetching all components that match some the role
"RecordableEventDescriptor", but there is no conditional section to decide
either or not the preference concerning the event type should be displayed.
2018-05-31 16:42 GMT+02:00 Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net>et>:
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.
I disagree with you and I’ve already explained in details the reasons in a
bullet point list.
--
Guillaume Delhumeau (guillaume.delhumeau(a)xwiki.com)
Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS
Committer on the XWiki.org project
On 31 May 2018, at 16:23, Clément Aubin
<aubincleme(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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%20Application/) 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 ?
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”.
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.
Again we don’t agree about this. We’re not implementing a chat. We’re
implementing message sending as in email sending. Live message sending is
another feature.
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).
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.
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