[Adium-devl] Trac .11 on eider

[Colin Barrett]

On Apr 26, 2009, at 7:37 PM, Zachary West wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 21:44, Colin Barrett <colin at adiumx.com> wrote:
>> I worked this out with zac & coderanger on IRC. The announcer  
>> plugin suits
>> my needs quite well.
>>
>> Sorry for being so cranky earlier; my personal email situation is  
>> not very
>> good -- it's split across several accounts on several servers and  
>> checked by
>> several Macs, so there's not a good way to manage filtering that  
>> Just Works.
>> It was wrong of me to take this out on Zac & Noah, and I'm sorry  
>> about that.
>>
>> -Colin
>
> I know it bothers you Colin, but I just re-enabled the email
> validation. I don't think this is a bad thing: we WANT users to get
> our email responses. We want to force them to respond to us. We get a
> lot of tickets that go unanswered because I'm betting the user didn't
> provide an email.
>
> Filter it if you want; it's really, really simple to do so.


Regarding me:

I explained why it wasn't easy for me to filter email. I'm assuming  
you just didn't read that part. In any case, I've set my trac mailing  
address to a gmail account I rarely check with a tag to send them  
straight to the trash.

Regarding our users:

Yes, it's nice to be able to get responses to people. But trac will  
email you about old tickets *forever*. You can't control this, or  
unsubscribe from these notifications. Let's say a user files a ticket,  
and it gets filed away as Good idea for "later". Then, in a couple  
months or years, folks pick up the ticket and start talking about it.  
Hello one pissed off user because we're spamming them. Or what if a  
user happens to be unlucky enough to be the first person to file an  
issue that gets a lot of dupes? Now they get spammed every time we  
dupe a ticket. Or move a ticket to another component. Etc etc.

The problem isn't when people are actually trying to use trac to get  
in touch with a user. That's fine, and I want this to happen as well.  
What I think is stupid, and don't want to read, and suspect our users  
don't want to read, is all the useless notifications that get sent out  
as well. For a while (I'm not sure if trac still does this) but I was  
getting follow up emails on *every ticket I'd ever commented on*.  
That's a lot of tickets, a great many of which I no longer care about.

To put it another way: According to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (which  
isn't enforced, so don't worry), one of the things a bulk emailer must  
provide to not be considered spam is an opt out mechanism. Trac has  
*no* opt out. You cannot disable these emails other than deleting your  
account. This is such *basic netiquette* that even the old white guys  
in CONGRESS gets it.

Verifying the email addresses of our users is great. But we also don't  
want to send them pointless emails with no way for them to turn them  
off, aside from sacrificing their ability to report more bugs, which  
is what we want them to do in the first place.

-Colin