39584 - Non existing newsgroups should be offered to be removed when selecting them

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Henrik Gemal]

If you select a newsgroup that no longer exits on the newsserver mozilla should 
ask you if you want to remove the newsgroup. Netscape 4.x did this.

Comment 1

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

yeah, I got to fix this.  accepting, marking m17.

Comment 2

[scottputterman]

moving to future milestone and noting dependency.  We need the other bug to work 
in order for this to really be futureable.

Comment 3

[laurel]

mass change of huang's news bugs to stephend.

Comment 4

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

The other bug is fixed, marking mail3.

Comment 5

[Henrik Gemal]

is there a bug the missing unsubscribe menuitem for the contextmenu in the 
folderpane?

Comment 6

[scottputterman]

marking nsbeta1-. You can use the delete button to delete a newsgroup.

Comment 7

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

of course you know we have the unsubscribe context menu available now for the
newsgroups.  (just a side note, that doesn't affect this bug.)

Comment 8

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

I think all you have to do is implement nsNntpIncomingServer::GroupNotFound()

I believe we call it in all the right places (in nsNNTPProtocol.cpp), but I'm 
not 100% sure

Comment 9

[Håkan Waara]

Taking.

We will have a dialog that pops up in different cases, where we notice that the 
newsgroup doesn't exists - so we will suggest the user to unsubscribe from it 
with a "This server is no longer existant....Unsubscribe?" type of dialog.

Now, it would be nice if you (robinf, mpt and jglick) could come up with an 
appropriate wording for this dialog. Thanks

Comment 10

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

I can give you the wording from 4.x:

The newsgroup netscape.foo does not appear to exist on the host news.mozilla.org.
Would you like to unsubscribe from it?
[OK]  [Cancel]

Comment 11

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

The main point of this alert is to report an error -- that we couldn't find the 
group. Allowing the user to unsubscribe is just a shortcut; it's quite possible 
for the user to unsubscribe outside this alert, so we shouldn't use a caution 
alert when the user doesn't really need to unsubscribe in order to continue.

This makes it quite similar to this situation in the Finder:
+-------------------------------------------------+
|:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
+-------------------------------------------------+
|  _   The alias “foo” could not be opened,       |
| (X)  because the original item cannot be found. |
|                                                 |
|       (Delete Alias) (Fix Alias ...) ((  OK  )) |
+-------------------------------------------------+

So in this case, I suggest:
+-------------------------------------------------+
|:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::|
+-------------------------------------------------+
|  _   The group “rec.arts.ascii” could not be    | \
| (X)  updated, because it could not be found on  | > large system font
|      the server “news.foo.bar”.                 | /
|                                                 |
|      The group may no longer exist, or the      | \ small
|      server may have stopped carrying it.       | / system font
|                                                 |
|                      ( Unsubscribe ) ((  OK  )) |
+-------------------------------------------------+

Comment 12

[lchiang]

What is the target milestone for this?  cc: mcarlson for fyi on Netscape
commercial since we have a localization UI freeze and this bug is adding a new
dialog.   

Comment 13

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

we could make the necessary .properties change before the freeze (so they can be
localized) and then finish writing the code.

Comment 14

[Håkan Waara]

Setting milestone (for lchiang)   :)

Comment 15

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

hwaara and I are going to get the necessary proprerties changes in today, so 
that they can be localized.  then, we can worry about the rest of the bug.

Comment 16

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

Attachment: resources part of the fix

Comment 17

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

that patch has landed, so we are in before the UI / localization freeze.

Comment 18

[Håkan Waara]

Status: this bug is not idle, I'm still hacking on it.  :)

Comment 19

[Håkan Waara]

*** Bug 43298 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 20

[Håkan Waara]

bumping off my 0.9.1 list...

Comment 21

[Håkan Waara]

Seth promised to help me with this once he get some free cycles after the 0.9.1 
milestone.

Adding my patch here. The problem I had was to have the PRUnichar*s in one 
array to be able to pass the button names to ConfirmEx()...

Comment 22

[Håkan Waara]

Attachment: patch (not fully functional, some code commented out!)

Comment 23

[Håkan Waara]

It compiles. It runs, but somehow the alert doesn't display. I debugged it for 
long, maybe too long so I still don't see the problem.

This patch may be a great help for that person who decides to complete the fix. 
It's probably 80% fixed.

Attaching new patch and reassign to sspitzer.

Comment 24

[Håkan Waara]

Attachment: fix

Comment 25

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

Attachment: fix, get 4.x parity

Comment 26

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

fixed.

Comment 27

[Håkan Waara]

Nice.  Seth, did you do any testing before landing this? I noticed
groupNotFound() fires very often when I worked on this.

Comment 28

[Håkan Waara]

I found a regression.

Try doing this: put in 'news:alt.flashback' in your urlbar and hit enter. This
will auto-subscribe you that group. Now you'll get the alert *very* frequently
for 'alt.flashback'

Suspicion:  we are not commiting our subscription change to the db after using
SubscribeToNewsgroup() which will make GroupNotFound() go crazy.

Reopening.

Comment 29

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

this is working fine for me.

talking to hwaara, he might be seeing this due to some changes he's got in his 
local tree.

Comment 30

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Auto-subscribe is the only way to test this feature, and since auto-subscribe
(and subscribe in general) seems to suffer currently from bug 101023, I'm
marking a dependency.

Comment 31

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

I meant bug 105183...

Comment 32

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Verified FIXED with builds:

Mac OS 9.2 - 2001-11-02-08
Windows 2K - 2001-11-06-03
Redhat 7.2 - 2001-11-06-12

Adding an invalid newsgroup such as news://news.mozilla.org/foobar prompts me to
subscribe, adds it to the folder pane, then on expansion of the news server, it
notifies me that the newsgroup is invalid, and asks me if I want to unsubscribe
from it.

If I cancel this dialog, the newsgroup remains...  Upon reboot, and selection of
this newsgroup (or expanding the twisties) again, I get the same dialog.

If I OK this dialog, the newsgroup is succcesfully removed and all is well.