Re: "Abuse" of Contact User feature

[Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 09:18:48AM -0500, Curtis Hovey wrote:
> > Uhh, depending on what you mean by "flawed feature" I don't agree at
> > all. If you're saying "this is a valid feature but we can't figure out a
> > way to avoid random peopple spamming teams" then I'm in agreement.
> 
> No I'm saying:
> 
>         As a launchpad team member,
>         I want to contact all the launchpad team members,
>         to inform them of an important event.
> 
> We cannot use the team mailing list because the subscription is an
> option.

I don't understand this sentence, but it mentions mailing lists, and
very few teams have mailing lists. The key advantage of this feature is
that it gives you a unified way to contact a team, regardless of what
bits the team has screwed on.

At any rate, I think I see one of the points you're trying to make --
that a valid use case exists where a team member wants to contact other
team members.

> The "spam" issue is only valid from the context of a non-member
> contacting the team. I do not know of a reason why a non-member needs to
> contact *every* team member.

I can't second-guess users either, but people use tools in unexpected
ways and I think erring on the side of allowing more contact is not
necessarily bad. I can come up with some strawmen at least:

    - User X visits a project page to figure out if a project that looks
      interesting is still active; the project is owned by a team and he
      wants to ask whether anybody's still working on it.

      You can argue that he should just contact the project owner.

    - Team X manager M wants to invite Team Y to be a member. He knows
      that this effectively means that Team Y will get notifications
      when Team X is involved, so he wants to make sure nobody's going
      to freak out if it happens; he writes to Team Y and asks if that
      sounds reasonable or not.

      You can argue that he should just ask Team Y's owner who in turn
      can ask his team members. But Team Y's owner could only really
      contact his team members if a contact-my-team feature exists.

    - User A wants to give a suggestion to the Launchpad engineers of a
      new technology to use. He doesn't file a bug or a question because
      it's not actually a bug or question; instead he writes to the team
      and asks

      You can argue that this can go through the owner anyway.

>         As a user of the fnord PPAs,
>         I want to contact the fnord PPA team,
>         To as a question about the builds.

And this isn't a bad use case either, though again you can just contact
the owner and have him relay.

It does sound like so far we've established valid use cases for:

    - Contacting all members within a team I'm a member of is valid.
    - Contacting a team through its team owner (or admins)

Are there others?
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis | [+55 16] 3376 0125 | http://launchpad.net/~kiko
                        | [+55 16] 9112 6430 | http://async.com.br/~kiko