Imported from previous forum
I think the poster edited and re-saved the post (which triggers another notification), but we will verify. Is it possible to forward the Notification e-mails you recieved, as there may be a clue in the syntax. This will be rectified with the ability to post without notifying (so long as it is used accordingly) which is imminent.
Entries are not only from users who could have posted twice because the website response was not fast enough. I also have duplicates for public review notifications. Can we exclude the possibility that a user is subscribed more than once to notifications?
I am afraid it was not posted twice. I entered a test post and made sure that I only submitted it once. The notification went out twice to my colleague Andreas Kolf. Please investigate this asap to see if all followers of General Q/A are affected by this. As there are more than 4000 followers it is a big difference if the system has to send out 4000 or 8000 emails for every post.
A second issue with General Q/A entries is the Access drop down list. It is not pre-populated with "Public" when I add an entry. I did not pay attention to it and left it as it was. I am not sure what it exactly was but it was not "Private". Nonetheless, that has caused my first attempt of test posting to create a private entry in General Q/A which means that no notification is being sent. I am not sure what benefit such a feature has but why is the Access drop down list not preset to "Public" for new entries? Is it something I can configure in my profile? The drop down list entries seem to be a mixture of access settings (public/private/logged in users), discussion categories, committees, working groups and document library entries (including guest instances???). Looks very complex if one just wants to post something quickly.
Last not least, I am a follower of General Q/A but it does not always (it does sometimes and I do not know when) show up in the list of categories I follow. Finding it in the list of all categories is cumbersome due to the lack of alphabetical sorting. Not being able to find it in the short list of categories I follow is a problem that can hopefully be solved easily.
Thanks Hanno. After much head-scratching we have an idea of what might be causing you to experience this that we are now investigating. I'll come back asap.
The Access Control drop-down currently defaults to "Private"- this was an FPL policy decision, (and would be simple to change), BUT it does have the implication that the user would be more likely to create duplicate notifications whilst editing, which runs contary to our collective efforts to eliminate any redundant notifications. Currently, if the user saves the post as "Private" no notifications are sent at all, so the post can be drafted, edited and saved with impunity, and then, when complete, posted with the final setting required. If it defaults to Public, we think you will see a lot more inadvertent notifications re incomplete posts.
There is an additional consideration that for Discussions/Groups with closed membership and access controls set to the closed group membership, it may not be wise to default to "public", - defaulting to "Private" means widening the access is always an "act of will" so that posts that by context should be restricted are not inadvertently posted as "Public". This is also considered good data protection policy, as "inadvertent" consent is not admissable as a defence by the Data Controller (FPL!) under EU law re the disclosure of personal data. The onus is on the Data Controller to secure explicit consent, which manual specification of a wider ACL setting satisfies.
There is actually a "personal default" setting available for content ACLs, but I need to check whether Discussions fall within its scope, or whether the function is active on the site before I respond. It is set to "Private" by default if activate, for the data protection reason.
We have actually just been discussing an approach to this isse with Tim, as we had noticed several Topics had been created by users as "Private" when they clearly were not intended to be, which clearly points to a wider ergonomics/usability shortcoming. To address all the various considerations, we tend to favour retaining the default as "Private" for users' own protection, to prevent duplicate notifications, and in support of Data Protection"best practice", but also to display a "Pop-Up" when attempting to save as "Private" that alerts the user that noone else can see the post, and no notifications will be sent. Something along the lines of "Your are posting this as Private- Noone else will see it and no notifications will be sent. Are you sure "Yes"/"No". The post action would only complete if the intent was confirmed. We think this would eliminate the problem without causing the other problems.
If the poster says "no" it would throw them back to Topic edit mode to revise the access control accordingly. Once the habit is established its easy to remember, and this would prevent any secondary consequences.
The drop-down list is purely Access Control settings, but these include a drop-down list of "Access Control Lists" reflecting the dynamic composition of every group (Committee/Sub-Committee/Working Group/Employee Group, etc...) of which you are a member, so that you can restrict access and notification of any posted content to the composition of any of those sub-groups, even when the content is posted within another group/discussion or as stand-alone personal content. The "generic" Access Controls (Public/Your Connections/Logged-In Users/Private) are always shown first in the drop-down list, followed by the various types of "collective". So for example, content posted with Access Control, set to "Deutsche Boerse Employee Group" would only be accessible by and notified to your colleagues. The drop-down list also includes:-
- Any "Meta-ACLs" (admin configured groups of groups inclusive of all members of the composite groups, but excluding duplication). These have the names specified by the admin who created them
- Signatories to any named License you have published (although this capability is only available to the small sub-set of users who have this capability). This means content could be posted that is only available to / notified holders of the corresponding Licnse (which is distinct to the content itself being licensed)- for example, the documentation or update to a piece of Licensed content can be posted so to be available to holders of the License, without the documentation itself being within the scope of the license.
- You can also create your own explcit ACLs- for example if you wanted to post something unique to two specific people you can manually create and ACL list and nominate them for inclusion.
There are one or two "collective" types used to store legacy migrated information (document libraries for example), that could arguably be excluded from the list in the interests of brevity, but the rest have an explicit function.
This Access Control dropdown is common to all content, not just specific to Discussion posts.
Note that for most users, the list will be much shorter- FPL "power members" will tend to have longer list because of representation in many more groups.
I am wondering whether a "help" icon alongside the Access Control dropdown might be a good idea to explain this, and also to draw users attention to the capabilities it unleashes! Could be split into a Basic and Advanced section to keep it short and sweet perhaps?
I'll need to look into the last point- there is a request already logged re alphabetic sorting which should hopefully resolve this, but I'd like to verify this. A screen-shot or similar of the specific listing your are referring to would be useful to make sure we are talking about the same thing.
Thanks for input as always!
Once again, the features available on the new website create unwanted complexities and reduce usability. Users posting entries to discussion categories do not want this to be private, they want others to read it and respond. Defaulting it to private does not make sense. In my case it does not even show "Private", it shows "Discussions category: 5.0 Feedback". That also makes no sense, i.e. if I am in General Q/A and press "Add" I want to add a public post to General Q/A, no more, no less. I strongly question this to be an "FPL policy decision" and do not believe people realised that this would affect public discussion forums such as General Q/A.
This has also nothing to do with multiple notifications which I am now convinced are just a bug in the software that needs to be fixed asap. Once I have made an entry private, it stays that way and I have to re-enter a new entry to make it public. I can only edit the content but not the access control.
I am opposed to making things more complicated by asking the user posting to a public forum to confirm that he wants to post it as private. You mention examples where topics were unintentionally posted as private. People then simply wonder why nobody responds. I would welcome a change that removes the Access drop down list for public forums or shows it to be Public without an option to change it. I think it is more than confusing to have different entries in General Q/A that have all kinds of visibility settings. Has anybody from FPL requested such a feature and what was his/her use case?
My colleague and I just got another duplicate entry for a General Q/A topic. When can you give an answer to the question of how many of the 4000+ followers receive duplicate notifications? Thanks.
On the last point of Genenral Q/A not showing up in the list of categories I follow. Not sure if a screenshot will help. Just login with my credentials and pull up that list. I follow 17 categories and sometimes only 16 will show. I cannot reproduce the error but it occurs frequently. The 17 categories are also not shown in the same order which makes it even more confusing to determine if I am missing something. I also sometimes get a token mismatch error when involving the main discussion category page. Maybe that information helps but I know it is not much to work with. I use multiple tabs in Firefox to save time as it takes very long to pull up the General Q/A page.
Ken, what has been the result of your anaylsis, i.e. can you confirm that messages are sent out twice?
Thanks,
Hanno.
Hanno,
I spoke with Tim about this last week to provide an update, and have had a further conversation with Kathleen on Friday. The good news is we think we are close to a resolution.
The duplication of posts seemed to be unique to the "General Q&A" discussion category, and to not apply to all recipients. We could not replicate it on other Discussion categories, or indeed on the General Q&A one on the test infrastructure (which does not actually send mail), all of which behave correctly in terms of the triggers generated. The one unique attribute of the General Q&A discussion category to which the different behaviour can be attributed is the size of the list of followers (although the "Announcements" category is even bigger with 6,174 followers, it just doesn't get much activity). In every other respect, the other categories are identical.
The implication of this is that it looked like the cause was something to do with either the failure and recovery of the bulk mail generation process due to infrastructure constraints, or the overlapping of the respective notification mail trigger processes in cases where the background e-mail send process took an extended time, such as when the size of the "send" list is very large, as it is for the General Q&A and Announcements categories.
Unless we actually send the e-mails to a list that large, the problem cannot be replicated, so very tricky to de-bug. So to make progress in isolating the cause, Rasel has had to develop a test harness which emulates the sending of 4700+ e-mails to "non-live" recipients (as obviously we cannot actually send them to live recipients as a test); firstly in order to replicate the problem (which we have now done); and secondly to check whether it is fixed (which it looks like it now is on our test instance at least). There is still a very remote residual risk that a problem could occur when put live, as the one aspect of the end-to-end test we cannot perform is the actual send process, to live users, on the production SMTP infrastructure, for obvious reasons, but we dont expect this to be a problem, given that we have been able to replicate it and have isolated he aparent cause.
This fix impacts the same components as an existing high priority feature request to allow content to be posted without notifications being generated, and to modify the e-mail subject line for improved brevity, so it is being handled as part of the same work package, but it looks like it will be possible to deploy this bit in advance of the rest.
We are conducting some final tests, but hope to be in a position to deploy this in the next couple of days.
Best
Ken
Thanks for the update, I will keep my fingers crossed. Luckily we do not see much activity in the General Q&A compared to last year but I am sure we will get further "test" cases from people posting content.