By mattengland on

I just posted a followup question to:
http://drupal.org/node/21251

How do I track any responses? More importantly, how does the original author of this node get notified that I made a followup?

Notifications and tracking on Drupal.org seem rather poor. :(

-Matt

Comments

ezheidtmann’s picture

ezheidtmann commented

You can see the nodes you have commented on or created by clicking "recent posts", then the "my recent posts" tab, or "my account" and then "track."

AFAIK there is no way to subscribe to email notifications for anything other than project issues (can do that at http://drupal.org/project/issues/subscribe)

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

Hi clydfrog,

The method you mention does not display my followup/reference at:

http://drupal.org/node/21251

(All my forum posts show up per your method...and I had been using this for a while.)

Any other suggestions?

-Matt

ezheidtmann’s picture

ezheidtmann commented

Follow the link I provided to subscribe to project issues. You will receive an email every time someone comments.

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

This will show all the forum topics you participated in http://drupal.org/tracker/22010
--
Consulting: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

Yes, but I want more then just a *forum* tracker. I want to track every node/content I've added anywhere for followups, including http://drupal.org/node/21251 .

Anyone replying to this thread: please understand this point.

-Matt

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

When you visit the page I sent you, it will show the issues as well that you contributed to. There will be a red asterisk beside it to indicate it was updated.
--
Consulting: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented
kbahey - May 2, 2005 - 07:14

When you visit the page I sent you, it will show the issues as well that you contributed to. There will be a red asterisk beside it to indicate it was updated.
--
Consulting: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

What are "issues"? I'm afraid I'm a newbie and I don't understand. Sorry.

Here's my key point:

Is there ONE place I can go to search for ALL my references?

I don't what kind of node/issue/forum-post/blog/whatever...I just want to be able to track and search EVERYTHING. I'm curious: why is this concept seemingly difficult for Drupal.org to grasp?

Without this capability, I'm afraid I will find Drupal.org usage quite difficult.

Unfortuantely, the aforementioned link ( http://drupal.org/tracker/22010 ) does not show all my references in my browser. Here's what I do see when I visit http://drupal.org/tracker/22010 :

recent posts
all recent posts
my recent posts
Type	Post	Author	Replies	Last post	
forum topic	How do I track my followup to this Drupal.org node? 	mattengland	6	7 min 47 sec ago	
forum topic	Howto minimize blog editing and reflect last-edit date? 	mattengland	10	7 hours 37 min ago	
forum topic	Mark URL form of: /author/date/title... 	mattengland	6	12 hours 49 min ago	
forum topic	Howto prevent per-user "Path alias" while supporint pathauto? 	mattengland	1	1 day 6 hours ago	
forum topic	Howto change existing pathauto aliases? 	mattengland	2	1 day 8 hours ago	
forum topic	Can Drupal support "blogging by email"? 	mattengland	1	1 day 12 hours ago	
forum topic	Seeking consultant 4 URL path aliasing requirements 	mattengland	0	6 days 13 hours ago	
forum topic	"administer » access control" not available in 4.5.2? 	mattengland	3	6 days 16 hours ago	
forum topic	Is there anyway to track forum threads via email? 	bslade	3	6 days 17 hours ago

(If you would like, I can take a graphic snapshot and post the picture somewhere for reference; I didn't do that yet because I'm trying to save time this morning.)

I see no reference to the "Pathauto refactoring" node ( http://drupal.org/node/21251 ) in here. Meanwhile, I can find the "Pathauto refactoring" node with a general "Search" of "mattengland"...but this search does not pull up all my forums posts. :(

-Matt

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Tracker does not show project issues. Follow the link that clydefrog sent to subscribe to various projects and issues you are interested in.

Is there one place to see everything? No, not really. At least not yet.

-sp
---------
Test site...always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

Ok, so I understand there is no one place to track all changes. It's good to know that...but I'm still baffled about how Drupal.org stakeholders organize and become aware of the specific parts of Drupal.org changes that mean something to them. I mean...do they read ALL the Drupal.org changes? If so...I simply don't have time to do that.

Can I track updates to http://drupal.org/node/21251 without having to manually poll this one specific "node" (or whatever it's called) all the time? Everyone keeps telling me to go to http://drupal.org/tracker/22010 ...BUT I SEE NO PLACE TO TRACK/SUBSCRIBE TO http://drupal.org/node/21251 there, nor do I see a place on http://drupal.org/node/21251 to do such subscription/tracking. Maybe there is just one place (even though it may not track other kinds of content) where I can go to track the other, non-forum stuff? I suspect this will be a "no," but I just need to ask to be clear. I'm left to wonder how authors of these nodes can get notified of comments...and in this case if mikeryan is ever going to see my comment on his pathauto rewriting until maybe he checks it a month from now and then it's too late.

Tracker does not show project issues. Follow the link that clydefrog sent to subscribe to various projects and issues you are interested in.

To reiterate, I don't know what a "project" or "issue" is. I just want to track content, but I'm willing to learn all this Drupal-specific nomenclature is if I can figure out how to track all the udpates to it. Is there a "Drupal nomenclature for dummies" or just a concice "Drupal glossary" link somewhere? I'm paging through http://drupal.org/node/6261 and I haven't found anything that summarizes this stuff well. Said link looks more procedural, which is fine for some learning scenarios, but not for mine at the moment, unfortunately.

I'm sure all these different forum/project/issue/blog/book/story/page designations are helpful to someone somewhere, but they are not helping me (the basic user) at the moment. Are these things all "nodes"? Is ALL content held in some flavor of a "node" (for ye OO programmers out there: think of a "node" as a the ultimate content base clase). If yes to both of these questions, why is there not some core track/notification capability that operates on all nodes, regardless of what "kind" of node it is? It seems to me that this capability would shut people like me up and solve a heck of a lot of problems.

I'm still scratching my head as to how something as seemingly as good as Drupal has gotten this far without this? I mean, do all the subscribers just go around manually checking all their node links all the time to see if someone has updated them? Isn't there some automated mechanism to tell an author (or anyone) when they have received feedback?

I've got to be missing something here...can anyone empathize with me?

-Matt

venkat-rk’s picture

venkat-rk commented

...can anyone empathize with me?

I certainly can, for one. And, I bet plenty of other drupal users too.

I spend a lot of time chasing forum topics everyday between my home and work computers and a laptop. The only thing that lessens my misery a little bit is that I have Firefox on all three computers, and I have Bookmarks Synchronizer extension installed on all three and keep syncing the forum topic bookmarks like crazy.

I raised an almost similar request to yours here:
http://civicspacelabs.org/home/node/12204#comment-2939

carl ditzler’s picture

carl ditzler commented

Discussion found here, here, and associated with the subscription module.

Sounds like there is interest.

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

Ok, I see voices of empathy and understanding...and I no longer feel crazy. Thank you. :)

If I get time, I'll try collecting all these "subscription-to-any-content" references in one place (maybe using this thing called a "project"?) and start banging the drum. I first have to at least have to slay some other Drupal demons on my own site.

If others want to "sign up" to this effort, maybe they can add a comment here to the "virtual petition"?

-Matt

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

You are welcome to do this, I will note that I have been successfully dealing with drupal.org for over a year now without these additional features and without the insane volume of additional notifications that such notifications would bring to me.

Your experiance of course will be different.

-sp
---------
Test site...always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

carl ditzler’s picture

carl ditzler commented

Agree with your comment about insane volume of notifications. I do see how someone may want email notification. Why not offer it as an option? I would be interested, however, in not email notifications, but a page I could go to listing nodes I subscribe to (not nodes I merely posted or replied to). I could also remove a node from my list. Perhaps sort alphabetically or by the date I added the node to my list.

kuro5hin.org, for example, has a hotlist feature to watch stories and to easily keep track of any new comments on a article.

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

If I'm not mistaken, is this "hotlist feature" not the same thing that partially exists and we desire to expand as per:
http://drupal.org/node/21757#comment-37515
?

Options might be to email notify periodically (say once a day or other period setting) if anything on the hotlist changes changes during that period (in this example, within one day)?

-Matt

dries’s picture

dries commented

We will look into e-mail subscriptions shortly. We have yet to evaluate the e-mail subscription module to see how it behaves on a busy site like drupal.org. We'll be sending out thousands of e-mails a day and need to figure out a way to deal with bounces, hardware resources, etc. It's slowly bubbling to the top of my TODO list.

In the mean time, the tracker module should do an OK job, except that it misses out on issue updates (bug reports). If you can think of ways to improve the tracker page, don't hesitate to share some mockups or patches.

We should be able to build both a "web-variant" and an "RSS-variant" of e-mail subscriptions. It should work almost the same, but it would be a lot easier to roll out (eg. no problem with e-mail bounces). Thoughts?

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

Yes, subscriptions should be generalized to support multiple methods of notification. Email and RSS should be the two initial methods.

There have been approximately one million requests for by-node-type-filtering for tracker. This could also be RSS enabled.

dries’s picture

dries commented

Trick factoryjoe or some other usability poobah in making a tracker GUI that implement this, and I'll write it for you.

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

I see continued excellent feedback. Good to know all this. I'll think more about alternative thoughts for tracking and notification, and if time allows, I'll post more here or somewhere related.

In the meantime: RSS-based things are foreign to me. I've been hoping to discover some "learning RSS for general usage purposes from the ground up" reference, but have yet to find one. Can anyone point me to what they think to be good references for RSS-learning-for-notification-and-collection purposes...for administrators new to RSS-based mechanisms like me?

Thanks again!
-Matt

zach harkey’s picture

zach harkey commented

At the bottom of every thread, a simple check box where you can request email notifications related to that page/story/thread/whatever, followed by a link to my user page where I might be able to manage(view/delete) any existing notification requests(subscriptions).

Something like this...
---

Notify me by email of activity on this page.
My notifications

: z

mattengland’s picture

mattengland commented

zachharkey - May 2, 2005 - 21:46

At the bottom of every thread, a simple check box where you can request email notifications related to that page/story/thread/whatever, followed by a link to my user page where I might be able to manage(view/delete) any existing notification requests(subscriptions).

Something like this...
---

Notify me by email of activity on this page.
My notifications

While I have yet to see the subscriptions module in action, I suspect it (or something like it) does exactly this. I doubt there's any debate on this point (but if there is, please chime in with the alternative views).

Rather, I suspect the Drupal.org is 1) the performance issues surrounding all the email traffice generated from the site, especially for immediate notifications, and 2) minimizing the mass of email for those with lots of subscriptions.

(For the powers that be: please correct me if I'm mistaken.)

I've got thoughts on both of these points, but not enough time to articulate them here; they are probably not unique points, and I suspect others will chime in later if they haven't already thought of them and posted them elsewhere.

-Matt

samwilson’s picture

samwilson commented

Surely a feed of /user/xxx/track would be a happy thing? Hm, though of course one'd have to login to get the feed....

tigrezno’s picture

tigrezno commented

I've created a new module that adds support for phpBB style notification. I'm waiting for a cvs account to upload it.
It's name is comment_notify, stay alert!