Provide a page showing all the users following a given issue

...coming from #1304550: Display count of issue followers when viewing an issue

related idea: #1307540: Provide charts that visualize issue activity over time

Is there a separate issue dealing with +1/-1 comments somewhere?
(If people want to simply signify their support or rejection of a proposal, are they still supposed to do that through commenting?)

Yep, here you go Daniel: #42232: Help Maintainers Manage Issue Priority by Encouraging Voting

PS: ...the issue's title actually was "Allow voting on issues & comments in drupal.org - Death to "+1" comments." a while ago ;)

+1 - the problem with the new subscription system is that you don't know whether a given participant in an issue is still actually watching the issue. This would at least allow you to be pretty sure that any replies directed towards specific users will be seen by those users.

node/N/project-issue/followers seems reasonable for the path of a default view. It does seem easy. Would it be an appropriate novice issue for a new d.o contributor?

...the problem with the new subscription system is that you don't know whether a given participant in an issue is still actually watching the issue.

Good catch Dane! I actually haven't thought of this and I believe it deserves a better (more direct) way to be visible to the people reading through an issue than having to "dig" in the "followers list" page we aim to create here. I thing that perhaps a "(following)" status indication next to the usernames in each comment would be better, but then this is a whole separate issue. If people thing that this would be a huge "UI overwhelm" (also because most people posting comments are most likely to be following the issue), we can then have it the other way around: a "(not following)" indication for those that post comments but later on unsubscribe .../*cough*/ "unfollow" I mean ;)

Why should this information be public?

I don't really see the point of making this information public either. I can see where having the count of users following is useful, but the actual list seems like overkill and (maybe) a privacy violation. There may be times when I want to follow an issue without necessarily making it known, and to me this is a distinct advantage of the new Following system.

It seems that the primary benefit of having such a page would be as described in #6/#8 - allowing users to know whether another given user will be notified about replies to an issue. Very valuable feature and overlooked deficiency in the new system, IMHO.

The only benefit I can see of not having such a page is allowing people to subscribe 'clandestinely' or 'anonymously' to an issue. I can't imagine there's a huge number of users interested in that. It would really be no different than before- everyone knew that you were subscribed to an issue by virtue of you having posted in it. Now they'll know because you are listed on a following page.

Personally, I prefer to maintain the status quo rather than dropping long-standing features in favor of new ones.

The "followers page" is a new feature. Current users of the feature do not know how the data is treated.

In the past, your issue subscriptions had to be public because they were done through a comment (unless you subscribed to all issues in a project). I think that, at the very least, we should have a follower count (there's another issue for that), but I don't think there's anything wrong with providing a follower page.

I still dont see what we GAIN by having a followers list. I can think of several situations in which I might want to follow privately, especially considering the political and/or policy discussions that happen in queues like webmasters or groupsdrupalorg. If I am a webmaster and a specific user has a history of causing problems, I may want to monitor how they behave in other issues. I may start following issues in a specific queue without wanting the maintainer to realize I have interest until I'm ready to get involved. I can think of lots of reasons not to make it public, but I have yet to see anything we specifically gain from it, other than the ability to say 'Oh look webchick is following my issue'

What about the use case where I make a comment that could use input from somebody else? I wouldn't want to bother them in IRC if they're already following the issue.

Another option is to provide this page and lock it down so only people with a given permission can see the page.

@heyrocker - With all due respect, have you read ANY of my posts in this issue? I think I spell out pretty clearly why this is a needed feature. cweagans makes the same point.

I understand your privacy concerns. Would it be a good compromise to limit access to the 'followers list' to only those people also following an issue? (Don't know if this is technically feasible...)

Fear enough Derek. I too see no use -personally- in hiding our contact info from issues we follow, but still you have to admit that it would at the very least be thoughtful and polite on our part to give other members of our community the option of anonymity without "banning" them from using the new follow system. How about meeting half way like this then?...

Add a "List me anonymously in the Followers list page" checkbox/option in each user's profile (I think that profile -> notifications would be a nice place). This way the Followers page could look like so:

People following this issue:

John Doe
Jane Smith
...
...
Me
You
Some Other Guy
+ 13 anonymous followers.

@klonos +1 to your compromise. Knowing that, say, webchick is following your issue is really valuable if you need/want her input on something.

Another thought to consider. Instead of placing the followers list on another page where it's relatively hard to find, why don't we borrow an idea from github. They place right below the initial question the avatars and names of everyone following the issue. Very neat. Very easy to scan. Placing this information on another page just hides it unnecessarily.

I'm just going to brainstorm for a second here- it seems that the primary use of this feature is to find out if a particular person that you are replying to is following an issue, so what if we added an input filter, similar to the issue number expander, that would find @user strings and then indicate next to them whether that user is following the issue or not? This could be in addition to or instead of a separate page.

My thought (though I didn't express it) was that the avatars and/or names of following users would only take a max of one line. If there was more followers than fit on one line, it'd truncate the list and say "and 27 more" If you click on "and x more", there'd be a little popup that would then grab the remaining users. This is the same pattern Facebook, Google Plus and a number of other social networking sites follow.

My worry is if you put the list of followers on another page, there'll be a huge drop-off in the # of people who see it. Something akin to project issue statistics page. It was years after I started using d.o. that I first noticed that page and I still can't consistently remember how to find it.

This is pretty valuable information and I think it should be front and center on the page.

@dww, #21:

a global "I'd like a tin-foil hat" killswitch

LOL :D

If anything, the compromise would need to be a 2nd flag in tiny grey print "Follow anonymously" (or something)...

Nice thinking Derek! I was about to propose some kind of "Anonymize me" link/hover-over button in the follower list (only for own name), but that would make "anonymizing" ones listing an 2/3 step thing. This could be a "follow anonymously" checkbox right under the follow button.

BTW, ...could someone please let me know how is the "following" flag currently stored in the db? Is it a separate table/field/what? Thanx in advance.

@dww I don't see any value in having my name public in a follow list, and I see value in having it sometimes hidden, so I am perfectly happy with the global killswitch compromise.

I'm not sure we need names of followers, I'm less worried about people knowing which issues I'm following than pinging me about issues which I'm not...

But in another issue someone mentioned doing a graph of when people followed (maybe by month or something), that does seem like useful information (or at worst, it'd look cool), in that if 100 people follow an issue the say it's posted then ignore it for 2 years it's different to something that was in the queue for 6 months and suddenly became a hot issue (i.e. a bug exposed by a contrib module or similar).

But in another issue someone mentioned doing a graph of when people followed (maybe by month or something), that does seem like useful information (or at worst, it'd look cool), in that if 100 people follow an issue the say it's posted then ignore it for 2 years it's different to something that was in the queue for 6 months and suddenly became a hot issue (i.e. a bug exposed by a contrib module or similar).

that's in #1307540: Provide charts that visualize issue activity over time

Put me down as another not keen on being listed. I'm not so set on it that I will fight to stop it from happening but I wanted to at least add my voice to the "don't list me" side of things. One of my favorite things about the new follow system was to be able to follow anything without having to post something sensible to justify my being there (I loathe "subscribe" posts and would just not follow an issue rather than do it if I had nothing useful to say). I also like that I can track things that I think are questionable behavior that I'm not sure, yet, if it should have maintainer involvement. So I have various reasons for using "follow" and the only time I would be comfortable being listed is if I am actually participating and, in that case, I'm already listed as a post author so a secondary list would be pointless.

Michelle

...people will still have the option to opt-out from being listed. See #21

#21 was a suggestion that he also listed as being way too much work. This issue is still active, not RTBC, which, generally speaking, means thoughts are still welcome, so I shared mine. I also acknowledge I'm not the one who would be doing the work so this isn't something I'm going to fight if most people are ok with it. But there's no way of knowing if most people are ok with it if those that aren't don't speak up.

Michelle

Can you pretty please leave our debate on other issues aside and cool down? I merely pointed to #21 to let you know that people expressed that concern before and that whoever decides to work on this will most likely make an effort to take care of it some way.

I haven't mentioned any other issues. I'm responding to your comment in this issue, #29, where you say "people will still have the option to opt-out from being listed" which implies it's a done deal and therefore no need for me to add my thoughts, which is incorrect.

Michelle

It would be great to have this feature at a user level as well as an issue level, i.e. I could take a look at a list of all my or another user's followed issues.

Those pages only display issues which the user has commented, not followed... This would be perfect, but would only work if I still typed "subscribe..." in each thread I wanted to keep tabs on.

No offense taken, I was indeed wrong ;)

I think the 'last updated' field threw me off; lately I've been following a few bugs that were older and confused when I didn't see them appear in the list (which was only populated by posts I had commented in). That makes perfect sense, as the ones I commented in are the most recently updated ones. My apologies!

The missing part is not the functionality, but the fact that there is no UI to get to this information. A "Issues" tab in each user profile page (in addition to the "Profile", "Posts" and "Commits" tabs) would be great.

I like this idea.

Builds a bit of a sense of the individuals who are about a particular issue.

There is more back-end discussion about what this could look like here:
https://disambiguity.notableapp.com/posts/960b8ce5781fb3cca2aadcec808f68...

I brought the ideas over into #2212591: Following up on Prairie Initiative Project Page

related dreditor github issue
https://github.com/dreditor/dreditor/issues/116 "add a participant list button like create commit message button"

So we don't have privacy of which issues we are following anyway, because there's a nice search field here:

https://drupal.org/project/issues/search?project_issue_followers=Steven+...

Which shows all the issues a particular user is following.

Is there a global opt-out of that? Can't see one.

So...we should either enforce some kind of privacy of issues I'm following, or be done with it, and add a list of users to the issue page somewhere.