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Pierre Jarraud added a comment - 02-Nov-2007 00:40
In my university we were asked by colleagues for the same possibility
+1 We've had this request as well at Whitman College.
This has also been requested by UC Davis users.
A big PLUS ONE from Oxford too.
Experience suggests that people dont really use forums. We belive this is because they're out of the way and becuase Email is much easier to use and to keep up with. Perhaps the FRC should weigh in on this request - maybe an OPC future deliverable? Thanks, L
+1 here as well, this feature would help stimulate a great deal more online discussion as users would know if there was "activity" on their discussion topic and be more inclined to enter into the system to read what was being posted.
Josh Further to my comment above, perhaps there should be a less noisey option to "inform when a message is added to a thread which I have contributed to". That would mean that less notification would be recieved but those that were would be more relevant.
There would have to be a corresponding option in the Preferences tool to set up the desired 'notification scheme', like 'Privacy Status', this could be applied on a per-site basis or across the board: - no notifications - notify me when a thread that I have contributed to has recieved a new message - notify me when a topic that I have contributed to has recieved a new message - notify me when a forum that I have contributed to has recieved a new message - notify me when any posting is made to any forum that i have access to on a site that I'm a member of Many apologies for adding a whole swathe of complexity to something that was originally fairly simple! But if a jopb's worth doing, it's worth doing well! +1
We have this request at the Australian National University as well. Forums is one of the most active tool at the ANU during teaching period. I'm agree with Adam that user can choose to receive notifications at different level, otherwise it might be too noisy. How about if we use RSS with authentication and user can subscribe RSS feeds at site level, forum level, and topic level? I think RSS will simplify implementation as it does not require the Preferences tool for choosing desired notification scheme. Is it feasible to implement RSS with Authentication in Sakai? We are considering to put some development effort implement this. Sakai already has support for authenticated RSS in the wiki tool and the podcasts tool so you may be able to borrow some code from there.
Personally I would like to see email notifications well supported for although I understand RSS (and would like it supported) most of the people using our Sakai install don't have an RSS reader and don't really understand RSS. I'd like to see this as well, as it would greatly improve Forums suitability in the general collaboration space. Ideally, email & RSS, though email is probably the more useful of the 2.
Lance, did the FRC, or any other groups express interest in moving forward on dedicating resources to this item? Lance/David, this seems to be a highly desired feature for the community. Is there a chance you could look into in time for 2.6?
Not in time for 2.6. It sounds like a nice feature and would make for a great community provided patch. :) Best, L
fyi, I'm currently working on this for Stanford since we need fill this gap before migrationg our users from our legacy discussion forums tool. I'm developing this in 2.4.x first 'cuz that's what we are running in production. Here is what we are doing:
Users can set their notification preference at the site level. There are 3 levels: 1. Notify me by email whenever a new message is posted 2. Notify me by email when a thread that I have contributed to receives a new message 3. No notification. We are targeting for Dec08 deployment. I will update my progress later. Will also upload the spec later. Lydia,
I'd be interested in helping you test/port to 2.5/trunk. Are you just looking at tackling notification, or are you also looking at handling: 1. message contents in the email 2. reply via email as well? --- Denny, Is it worth creating a new JIRA to track RSS feeds from Forums? Jason thanks for offering to merge it to the trunk.
In my implementation, the email notification will contain the new posting's content, including any attachments. ( I had to write a customized email service to handle multi-part with attachments, since SakaiEmailService doesn't allow attachments) . We would also include a url that takes the user directly back to the message in Sakai(requires login first if the user is not already logged in) . I'm looking into Joshua Ryan's entitybroker/direct servlet for this. For now, I'm able to take the user directly back to the specific Site's forum tool, (i.e. /portal/site/siteid/page/pageid), but not to a specific message yet. We are not doing reply via email. Ideally my designer would like forums and message tools to be integrated, but that's for the future (and for someone else:) ) Lydia, sounds like you've taken this on as a Task, so I'm going to Assign it to you for now so you can keep folks updated. Thanks!
Hi Lydia,
Is the code available publicly somewhere? I'd love to be able to look at gettting it into our trunk branch for our dec release ;-) The 2 Stanford features are checked into msgcntr/branches/SAK-11740/ (created from trunk at r54665) :
r54719 A new table is required, and the oracle version of ddl is checked in, at docs/SAK-11740_oracle.sql The features were originally developed based on 2.4.x but I was able to merge it to the trunk without much problems. I did a quick testing to make sure nothing obvious was broken. Let me know if you have any questions. Please see attached spec (forumsEmailCapabilityPhase1Only.ppt ) for details of these 2 features. I mentioned in an earlier comment that ideally we would like the url in the email to take the user directly to the message in Sakai(requires login first if the user is not already logged in) as what the users would see by navigating to that message. I tried out Joshua Ryan's entitybroker/direct servlet for this, and it worked pretty well except the url takes the user to a page with no iframes, so no site tabs or left nav bar, the site context is lost. We didn't like that, so we decided to just have the url take the users back to the specific Site's top level forums view.
We've merged this into our msbub bracnh and will be qa'id for our 2-6-x release
Noting that UCT tentatively plans to address this issue for 2.7.
This is not resolved in trunk (2.7), AFAICT. I see no trunk commit for this.
r54855
Merged -r54742:54747 https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/msub/uct.ac.za/vula/trunk/msgcntr Is this going to get merged into trunk at any point? Or just stay on the branch?
2 problems with this implementation:
1) if you opt to get all messages you don't get new threads 2) If you opt to get all messages you could get messages from topics you don't have the read permission in This need is also evident on our campus, particularly within the kinds of sites where the online discussion is "opt in." At course sites where posting is required and for credit, there's less demand for an email *push*. But at sites where posts may be sporatic or where the site participants are not *required* to visit, this is critical missing functionality. The current social networing norm of email notification is one obvious example of the use case.
At umich, perhaps our most conspicuous scenario is that of the Law School. They are looking to move their All School discussion forum into Sakai. The lack of email notification is a hard sell for their students. They are used to a listserv-- total email interaction-- and to Facebook. In the case of UM.Law (get it, CASE of LAW, ha!) they need just subject lines in the email notification. One reason they're getting out of the listserv is because it's too easy for a disgruntled student to forward the thread to a shaming website like Above the Law. So, the option to include message content or not would be vital. It also makes sense in regards information overload. What about a concoctinated "two lines" of the content, as in Recent Announcements? David's email on Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:41:42 +0200
From: David Horwitz <david.horwitz@uct.ac.za> To: Lydia Li <lydial@stanford.edu> CC: Steve Lonn <slonn@umich.edu>, Diana Perpich <dperpich@umich.edu> Hi Steve, I have merged in the last 2 fixes that adress a potential disclosure of information problem. The code in the branch now matches what we have been running in production for some time. Regards David Now that notification is sent when new threads are posted, there is an additional problem that users are getting notification of new threads in topics to which they don't have access. The fix added recently did prevent users from getting email notification of replies posted in topics to which they don't have access, but not to new threads posted.
We are testing to see if we can reproduce this locally in our branch.
It turns out that in the case of a new thread the threadlocal caching was leading to an incorect permission check in some cases
Megan the last issue is now fixed in this branch. Can we look at getting this into trunk?
I've merged the changes back to 2.6.x and will attach a patch, however have discovered a bug:
The email subject says: New Message Posted to {0} by {1} Will attach a patch to fix this. Attached patch to fix the subject line. It now says:
New Message Posted to Alliance by Sakai Administrator (admin) The 'Alliance' is our local installation name. This could also possibly be something like the site title perhaps so people know where the message was posted. It seems that the list of capabilities listed in the attached PPT and the commits associated with this ticket are quite different. At least in the port back to 2.6.x that I have done, whenever someone replies to a mesage, anyone else that has posted in that thread is emailed. There is no option to 'Watch' or opt out of the emails either. This is going to get annoying fast.
Are user preferences for the emails going to be incorporated into this task? Attached patch of changes that add email notification functionality to 2.6.x as SAK-11740-26x.patch
applied patch from Steve! thanks
@Steve Your SAK-11740-26x.patch applied very cleanly against our ~2.6 version of msgcntr, but it omits the change on messageforums-app/src/webapp/jsp/discussionForum/forumsOnly/dfForums.jsp. This provides the UI control which enables the user to access and change their email notification settings - which I think you, (from previous correspondence on this JIRA), thought was missing ;-).
Strange. The patch was generated from the revision that was merged from the branch to trunk, and run up locally, but you are right, it is incomplete and does explain the missing config page. Can you generate a new patch with everything and attach? That will need to go into 2.6.x as well. Thanks.
Sure. The file I'm attaching is a patch created by running your patch against the latest version of msgcntr on the 2-6-x branch, plus the previously missing diff for dfForums.jsp.
Thanks to all for working on this issue.
Could someone provide a status update on how things are working in production at this point? Thanks! Josh |
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Email notification of new posts to forum
