[FEATURE] Watchers
From the Hoth blog:
Watchers is a feature that allows anyone to subscribe or unsubscribe to a public discussion, as well as invite others to join. Currently, we have all the backend functionality completed. We're just sitting on the UI portion while we tweak the last minute details.
We expect it to roll out to the public in the next week if all looks good during testing.
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1 Posted by Eric on 07 Nov, 2009 02:34 AM
It looks like the Start Watching button is already out there.
2 Posted by rick on 07 Nov, 2009 02:36 AM
Yup, I threw that in there so we could start using it. I also started playing with the notify box. Justin decided it needed a real designer's touch though :)
3 Posted by Eric on 07 Nov, 2009 02:37 AM
Sweet! I do love the proposed design. It looks very nice.
4 Posted by sherman on 09 Nov, 2009 04:16 AM
The number of watchers could be a useful column to see when reviewing issues, this will enable us to see which ideas are most popular or which problems are most widespread.
5 Posted by rick on 09 Nov, 2009 09:01 PM
The number of watchers are shown in the dashboard already, but we may add them to the public view too.
6 Posted by sherman on 09 Nov, 2009 09:10 PM
Actually, I think it would be best if the number of watchers was visible only to support agents. Otherwise, you run the risk of having self-reinforcing loops, e.g. people watching a topic only because they see lots of other people watching it.
7 Posted by rick on 09 Nov, 2009 09:17 PM
I don't see a problem with people watching topics. I like the idea of using that as a show of support better than bumping topics with
+1.8 Posted by Eric on 09 Nov, 2009 09:19 PM
I would like to see them listed publicly as well.
9 Posted by sherman on 09 Nov, 2009 10:18 PM
Whether the watch count is visible to the general public or not should be up to the support agents. For example, you may wish to have the count private for competitive reasons, or you may not want to influence end user behavior (and thus distort the insights that could be gathered from the numbers).
A desire to be notified of issue updates and expressing support for a feature/bug fix, etc. are two very different things. If you want to address the +1 bumping behavior, it would be best to implement a dedicated voting mechanism independent of notifications, because you wouldn't want the latter influencing the former.
If you do implement a voting mechanism, let the agents determine whether they want the vote counts to be visible or not, for reasons too numerous to list.
10 Posted by rick on 09 Nov, 2009 10:29 PM
We have a separate voting mechanism actually -- it's just not exposed
in the UI yet.
We'll probably just assume sites will hide the counts with CSS if they
don't want them. A lot of people have asked for watching and voting,
so I'm going to assume the majority want the numbers shown. I
personally don't, it starts looking like Reddit or something.
Keep in mind, nothing we do is set in stone. We'll tweak things in
response to user feedback. Thanks for providing yours :)
11 Posted by smorr on 11 Nov, 2009 04:22 AM
Will it be easy for people who posted without an registered account (ie with just an email address) to unwatch a discussion? An issue I had is that people post to a very active discussion but then could not unsubscribe from this discussion.
12 Posted by rick on 11 Nov, 2009 05:23 PM
They can do it from their email now, by responding with #ignore. The email itself should mention this:
I don't want people being able to turn notifications off for other people. It seems odd to have a confirmation email for disabling subscriptions. It may come to that though...
If the user signs up, all of their existing data will move over though. Then they can easily manage their subscriptions.
13 Posted by Eric on 18 Nov, 2009 07:57 PM
I noticed when I first submit a new discussion it show me as watching the ticket until I reload the page.
14 Posted by rick on 18 Nov, 2009 10:32 PM
What issue?
15 Posted by Eric on 18 Nov, 2009 10:47 PM
It happened when I created http://support.github.com/discussions/graphs/120-network-graph-showing-branches-with-wrong-parent
16 Posted by rick on 18 Nov, 2009 11:01 PM
Hmm, I don't know. It works now? It might be a temporary thing until the queue sends the first notification email.
17 Posted by Eric on 18 Nov, 2009 11:02 PM
It looked like the user who was creating the ticket wasn't marked as
watching it until after the response was rendered.
18 Posted by rick on 19 Nov, 2009 04:09 AM
Thanks for the report, I'll look into it...
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Eric <
[email blocked]
> wrote:
19 Posted by rick on 19 Nov, 2009 09:09 PM
The new watcher stuff is up now. Let me know if you want to try it out and we'll turn it on for your site.
20 Posted by mike on 20 Nov, 2009 07:06 PM
Thanks, This is slick. Will provide feedback after crash-testing for a few ..
21 Posted by rick on 24 Nov, 2009 07:25 AM
Eric: The issue is that the discussion watchers get added in the background job. I'll rearrange some of this so it happens sooner and updates the UI immediately.
Thanks for the feedback everyone (I'm not being snarky, we actually received a lot of feedback in other channels :). We've activated the watcher changes on everyone's site. We'll be iterating and tweaking things as necessary.
rick closed this discussion on 24 Nov, 2009 07:25 AM.