Hi. In a recent Planar Bridge meeting it was brought up to our attention that new accounts may have the Official Announcement forum notifications disabled by default. It was proposed to make them enabled by default, maybe even have it as an specific forum policy, such that even if a judge changes their site settings to notifications off, they still have to disable the specific forum notifications if they’re not interested in getting any. This should help raise awareness about important announcements. Let me know if that would be possible or how can we try to make it happen. Thanks in advance.
Paul suggested something like this earlier, I’ll mention this thread to him.
The main issue is that currently, our only concept of “default” notification settings is for all general forums - so there’s no configuration option where we can default “Official Announcements” to email but “Comp REL” to none (for example). And I don’t think we want to default all general forums to on.
Maybe we should show the user the list of “public” forums and have them select notification settings for each one when they register? We’d populate it with some set of sane defaults.
Also have to consider what, if anything, we should change for existing users. If we’re concerned that a ton of current users are not aware that they can sign up for email notifications for the forum, maybe we should send out a one-time email to all current L1+ giving them some simple way to set their notification settings?
What about sending an email whenever a user gets access to a forum?
(consolidating them if one action gave access to several forums, obviously)
The email can read something on the lines of “you were granted access to these forums” and a prompt to change their notification settings, followed by a list of forums and their notification settings.
I love Dan’s idea to have a set of defaults, with no unique set for every single forum when someone registers a new account. And sending new judges the list of forums and the actual notification settings
Also, ideally, I’d love to see a one time change for everyone, to set Official Announcements notifications to “on”, and have a new thread in that forum letting everyone know about the change. How invasive would that be?
If it wasn’t clear, my suggestion works when you first register, but mostly applies to changes made afterwards, like a new forum being created or a role change that allows access to new forums.
For example, my region added an L2+ forum after I advanced to L2, but I didn’t know about it until I saw it by accident. Using the same example, a judge advancing to L2 now, won’t know about the forum until they stumble upon it.
Sending an email that tells you that you can now access this forum (and that your notifications are set to “no notifications”) would increase the number of people noticing it dramatically, and will let them know they’re not getting any notifications.
Sending a notification or taking an action when someone “gains access” to a forum isn’t going to fly, because that’s not an event that we can practically act on. You can get access to a forum from a forum being created, a gatekeeper being edited, being added to an event or project, creating an event or project, changing levels, changing regions, changing roles, and probably other things too.
Defaulting those notifications to “on” is much more practical. Currently, “Event Forums” and “Project Forums” default to on, but “General Forums” default to off. We would change “General Forums” to default to on, and give the user a list of the general forums and have them select an option for each one, with sane defaults set. e.g.:
- Official Announcements: [Email and On-Site Notifications]
- Un-Official Announcements: [Email and On-Site Notifications]
- …
- Test Forum: [No Notifications]
And let the user change them then and there. The problem is that it doesn’t help the 20,000 users who are currently registered and whose notification settings we can’t change unilaterally.
Ok, I think we agree on doing the default curated settings, and letting new users choice when they register. So, let me know if I help make that happen
Is it not possible to change the notification settings for Official Announcement for all existing users to Mail and On-site, then? Because that would be ideal, in my opinion
Hi.
Just pinging this one. Where do we go from here? How’s the process for going forward with this?
Just interested in knowing and to have some info for the project, not trying to rush anyone.
Thanks
Hey,
So, we’ve agreed on at least a partial solution, to add a “forum notifications” section to the registration process. It doesn’t help current users, but I don’t really know any way to solve that without activating notifications for a ton of people who have deactivated them, which seems like a great way to piss off roughly 15,000 people.
So the next step is for me to implement the changes to registration, which I will get around to. I’m quite busy, and already have a few projects in the pipe, so I’m not able to provide an estimate. Judges with experience in python (and ideally django) are welcome to contact me to join the dev team - the best way to prioritize work you’re interested in is, obviously, to do that work.
Great. Again, I was not trying to rush anyone, just trying to confirm the plan. Sadly, I don’t even know what django is, otherwise I’d be happy to help. Thanks again Dan.
We can actually broadcast an announcement about it.
Jack Doyle is in charge of the Magic Judges FB page. You can ask him to write something about it. He can also get it into the monthly news.
David Elden tweets judge news as well, so you can ask him to do the same.
It won’t be official, but it should reach practically everybody.
I started working on this today and made some progress. There are ultimately four things we want to fix:
- New users aren’t subscribed to official announcements
- New users aren’t subscribed to generic forums by default (regional forums, TLC/TLTP, L3)
- Existing users aren’t subscribed to official announcements
- Existing users aren’t subscribed to generic forums by default
I’m fixing #1 and #2 by adding a form to the registration process. It defaults to emails on for official and unofficial announcements, emails off for the other generic forums. I’m also setting the global “new generic forum post” setting to “email and on-site notifications” for new users, so that when they get access to things like regional forums or TLC/TLTP, those notifications default to on.
I’m fixing #4 with a maintenance script to ‘normalize’ the notification settings for all existing user accounts. This will not change what emails anyone gets as of right now. What it will do is create ForumSettings for each generic forum that the user has access to but does not already have a setting for. These ForumSettings will copy the user’s current “New Generic Forum Post” setting. Then, it will change the user’s “New Generic Forum Post” setting to “Email and on-site notifications”. Again, this doesn’t change what emails that person gets today, but it will mean that any /new/ generic forums they gain access to will default to email notifications. (Which, as we learned from none of the TLCs knowing that the TLC forum existed, is desirable.)
#3 is still tough. We have 22,000 user accounts. 12,000 active in the last 24 months, 10,000 active in the last 12 months. 7,000 L1+, all but 500 active within the last 24 months. The official Facebook and Twitter don’t have that level of reach, and there are thousands of local L1s who do not care that GPHJ applications are open. We can push out a message saying “hey you might want to check your email settings on JudgeApps”, but I don’t think we can just enable emails for existing users. We can possibly send out a one-time email to all L1+…
A one-time email to everybody seems like a good option.
If that email can list the forums that person has access to and their current notification settings, that would be even better.
#1 and #2 are fixed with tonight’s build, #4 is in the process of being fixed while the aforementioned script runs.
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1, 2, and 4 are all resolved since late 2018. For #3, I’ve been running a campaign of sorts using announcements posts and presently a sitewide banner to try to push the subscription rates up. I’m only tracking official announcements, but I expect that to be a decent proxy for people generally signing up for the notifications they want. Subscription rate has gone up about 25% in the last less-than-a-week, I’ll leave the banner up for another week or so to see how it goes.
Yes, I’ve seen the banner and immediately imagined it was related to this proposal. I want to seize the opportunity to thank you again Dan, for all your hard work in this (and others) modification.