webschuur.com

+1 subscribing

This is where to help, and hasn’t been commented on for five weeks:

http://drupal.org/node/34496

It is interesting that the very people who are complaining the most about people subscribing to issue queues are the very ones who have the knowledge to fix the problem with code are the ones who write the most posts about it.

I too find it annoying to see all the ‘Subscribe’ and ‘+1’ posts but really, but on the other hand, I understand why it happens too.

While I can’t write the feature, I certainly hope that it can be fixed during the redesign.

Issue tracking is not a problem with the users. It’s a problem with Drupal’s user experience.

This is more evidence that Drupal needs a User Experience team. The end users WANT to help. They want to be a part of the team. However, you are discouraging them from helping by 1) not giving them a formal way to track issues and 2) harping at them when they make their own way to find a way to track issues.

You won’t get heard.

Most drupal.org visitors won’t read this blog post. As Keyz said, they will see other people subscribe to issues and will happily copy that behavior. And they will keep on being unaware that every “+1 subscribe” will send an email to the maintainer. How would they know?

Look at it from another point of view. Subscribing to issues is a real need. It probably will take a while before a hassle free issue subscription is implemented on drupal.org. Why don’t you, as a coder, scratch your own itch, create e.g. a module that suppresses the trigger to send email on “+1 subscribe”, and propose that for inclusion on drupal.org?

1. In the process of the drupal.org redesign, there absolutely needs to be some way to subscribe to an issue without posting. I’m a developer and I really make an effort to make a contribution to other’s issues that I am interested in and want to subscribe to, but there are times that I just want to keep track of it. Besides, think of the poor issue queues that have 100+ comments on them with people that contributed at the beginning and are no longer interested, firing off an e-mail to each and every person.
2. Also on my wishlist would be some kind of user “kharma” or “reputation” system where people that contributed often and well earned a bigger reputation. You should be able to filter out comments by users below a certain reputation to see what the high-level users are saying about it.

I don’t understand (in general, not jabbing at Ber) why people continue to blog about this, rather than banding together in true Drupal fashion to work on fixing the issue itself by developing a subscription solution that drupal.org would be comfortable to go with (I’m not a coder and can’t assist with this area myself… I write documentation and answer support requests).

The “average” user of drupal.org notices any instance of “Subscribing” in a thread and (not finding any other way in their account) emulates that same behavior from then on. That’s not their fault and no one should get mad or blame them; that’s one area on drupal.org that should “just work”. This isn’t an issue you can put on the user’s end to deal with in some way that’s inoffensive to maintainers - the users are just doing the best “hack” available to emulate critical functionality that is well beyond “standard” on most any other site. Bookmarking is not a viable solution - as soon as the list gets remotely sizable it becomes useless, and no one wants to click through countless bookmarks on a regular basis just to “see” if there’s anything updated. The psychology/reasons behind why a user feels the need to subscribe is crystal clear.

As for me personally, knowing that it annoys some module maintainers, I’ll do it only sparingly on issues of importance to me to not lose track of in issue queues (and not at all if I “know” the maintainer has asked that it not be done). In the forum I’ll do it without a second’s hesitation or a shred of guilt. The feature is missing and needs to be fixed, and there’s tons and tons of talented guys and gals who could wrangle Drupal’s amazing abilities to fill this need in a heartbeat if an accepted solution were agreed upon (I know there are also a variety of preexisting modules that do this, but I’ve not tried them myself). I won’t pretend to understand whatever situation has got this functionality “stuck” for so many years, but it does seem clear to me that it’s something to fix at the root of the problem, rather than demand the understanding of countless thousands of users, asking each to “fix” it on their own end.

Unless I misunderstand the technology, I disagree with recommending that people use a tool like Update Checker for Firefox - won’t this, by polling many pages per user on a regular basis, cause a substantial increase of useless requests to drupal.org’s servers, possibly slowing everything down for everyone?

The other suggestions are good, but ultimately too developer-centric, and in any case still doesn’t solve the problem. Drupal.org has to be for everyone, not just programmers. Hopefully the redesign will also include additional functionality (such as this) for drupal.org that shows what Drupal’s capable of, rather than an archaic subset of functionality that makes it seem sparse and out of date compared to other sites.

Go Drupal! :)

I disagree with nearly everything in this post. Awesome job.

This question arise every now and then but I think that the only solution is to find a way to let people subscribe to content or use a system to filter user comments (e.g. only users that commited at least a patch or posted 100 times etc. can comment on the issue queue). It would be great if everyone would listen to your praise but simply it won’t happen. If the noise on the issue queue is really slowing the development (and developers) let’s find a viable solution.

From a guy who sometimes makes noise ;)

I get what you are saying, but does it not serve the developer to know who and how many folks the issue is affecting? Especially in terms of finding people to test new patches as soon as their out?