Changes to Phabricator review subscriptions

[Ben Cooksley]

On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 8:33 PM, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 9, 2018 10:08:28 AM CEST you wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> To improve the user experience around email and in-application
>> notifications from Phabricator, sysadmin have made some changes to the
>> configuration of our Herald rules.
>>
>> Going forward, instead of subscribing projects to reviews, we will
>> only be subscribing mailing lists now.
>
> So, should we now get all phabricator mail at, say, kimageshop at kde.org, or
> should we create a second mailing list, say krita-phab at kde.org? I do want to
> receive mail for everything krita-related that happens on phabricator!

That decision is up to individual projects.
To date most have opted to treat Phabricator like Reviewboard and have
it sent to their usual project mailing list.

>
>> For those reviews which have
>> already been created, they will be updated to reflect the new practice
>> the next time they are changed.
>>
>> This means that individual project members will no longer receive
>> notifications and emails for every single review or task change that
>> affects their project. Instead, they will only receive notifications
>> and emails for reviews they have been individually subscribed to.
>
> :-(
>
>>
>> To help this change take full effect, it would be appreciated if
>> people refrain from adding Projects as reviewers, as that will have
>> the effect of subscribing the Project to the review as well
>
> But what if that's what a project really wants?

This change was made due to a series of complaints Sysadmin received
noting that people were finding their Phabricator notification queues
useless, and who had also taken the step of filtering all mail they
received from Phabricator to a folder they never read. This defeats
the entire purpose of the system, and also means that reviews which
require that person's explicit attention were being missed.

It also meant people weren't responding to Sysadmin responses to
tickets these people had filed.

>
>> (Phabricator does not require you specify a reviewer)
>
> I know. Most newcomers don't and do not specify any reviewer, so review
> requests often fall between the cracks.

It was originally envisioned that every repository should have been
caught by one or more Herald rules which would have ensured mailing
lists were notified that the review had been created, hence why
reviewers weren't needed.

>
>> Should anyone have any questions regarding this, please open a thread
>> on the kde-devel at kde.org mailing list.
>
>
> I discovered today that I did not have a subscription to this list and that
> there are no archives, so I've missed all discussions, if there have been any.
> I would have expected the discussion to happen on kde-community, but maybe we
> just have too many mailing lists.

There wasn't a discussion in advance of this change as the perceived
impact was minimal (we simply substituted projects for mailing lists
in the Herald rules)
No Herald rules were removed.

Looking at our list of rules it seems that Krita doesn't have any
rules so it looks like you may have always been missing out on these
notifications!

>
>
> --
> Boudewijn Rempt | https://www.valdyas.org | https://www.krita.org

Cheers,
Ben