launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 7 October 2010 01:36, Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Robert Collins
> <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I received 26 mails telling me about expiry changes; many people will
>> have received more - I'm not particularly prolific in my involvement
>> with upstream projects.
>>
>> I realise that expiry has been a hot potato and the goal was to make
>> sure folk know... however I think that future things along this line
>> would benefit by a few tweaks.
>>
>> Firstly, i think it would be nice if there were a blog post about it,
>> because many *users* of the bug system will be affected even if they
>> are not a 'bug supervisor'.
>>
>> With a blog post in place, if we really need to grab peoples
>> attention, sending a single email with a summary of their projects,
>> the settings on those projects and a link to the blog post for details
>> would let folk know with only a single mail, and also give them a good
>> reference list for the things they may want to change.
>>
>> I don't know how many folk will have received duplicate mails, but if
>> we think its a large number, we might patch up things a bit by
>> offering an apology..... on the blog. I do know at least one upstream
>> who found the volume of emails distressing (and they only received 10
>> or so).
>>
>
> Hi, Robert.
>
> Thanks for the thoughtful inquiry about this.

+1, and thanks Deryck for the thoughtful reply.

I'm glad we're doing a retrospective on this, but we shouldn't
overlook the positives: we've reenabled a useful feature, we have
communicated to our users about an upcoming change rather than
surprising them, and although the delivery caused a bit of excess
email it could have been a lot worse.  (Or, I could say, it was a lot
worse last time, when you might remember thousands of bugs being
expired in error.)

I was one of the people that pushed for sending mail before reenabling
bug expiry, so I'm sorry too that it caused a mess.  I was thinking of
one mail per person, and I barely considered the risk that in sending
mail at all, we might send the wrong mail, which should have been
obvious.

I still think it's true that the majority of Launchpad users don't
read the blog or the mailing list, so if we do have to tell them about
something, we have to either send mail or have a way to give them a
notification through the web UI.  We have to build up the muscles to
do notifications well, and look for ways to avoid changes that need
them to be warned.  I do think it was right to turn expiry off and let
them turn it on: imagine how much worse it would be if we didn't send
just these notification mails, but rather thousands of expiry mails
with no warning.

Beyond the actions Deryck lists, perhaps we should have a guiding
principle that for changes like this we'll ramp it slowly rather than
sending it to everyone at once, perhaps guided by a feature scope that
selects.  Better to send 20 mails to 1% of users and have them
complain, then stop the script...

-- 
Martin