40260 - Subscribe dialog should support "new" newsgroups

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect, P3)

Description

[Henrik Gemal]

The subscribe dialog should support "new" newsgroup like both Communicator and 
Outlook Express does.
The subscribe dialog should have 3 tabs:
[ All ] [ Search ] [ New ]

Comment 1

[laurel]

"New" newsgroups was decided as low priority for this release --  it is
currently listed as a P4 item on our spec, which means it is not likely to show
up in seamonkey.

Comment 2

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

laurel is right.

the "new" view isn't going to happen for this release.

Comment 3

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

moving to m30, instead of future.

Comment 4

[scottputterman]

moving to future milestone.

Comment 5

[laurel]

mass change of huang's news bugs to stephend.

Comment 6

[Ian Tommins ('thelem')]

Adding 4xp keyword, since this is in Messenger 4 (verified with 4.7)
Adding [RFE] to summary

Comment 7

[Henrik Gemal]

*** Bug 102804 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Armando Villani]

Bug 102804 was reopened. It's not a duplicate of this bug.

Comment 9

[Markus Hossner]

Attachment: Patch

The patch adds a new groups tab to the subscribe dialog and does some really needed cleanup (whitespaces, ...) to insert the changes properly in the surrounding code.

Comment 10

[Markus Hossner]

Attachment: Patch (without whitespace changes)

The same patch but without the whitespace changes to see the really changes.

Comment 11

[David :Bienvenu]

neat! I'll try to run with this when I can.

Comment 12

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 275349 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Although this "works" I found it really awkward to use - it did show me some "new" groups once but then never again. Assuming you have to do a refresh to find new groups then I suggest a button "Find New" (which would change to "Show All") as it would be clearer that this does something other than just switch views. (Even if you can somehow display only new groups without refreshing every time then I think I would still prefer a checkbox.)

Comment 13

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 275349 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

thx for adding the license blocks, and thx for the patch.

Comment 14

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Comment on attachment 275349 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch

Markus and I found some issues with the hostinfo.dat update behaviour in this patch. So, please, everyone, don't check that in! We're on it...

Comment 15

[Markus Hossner]

Attachment: Patch 2

What Neil has discovered (see comment #12) was a bug and not a feature. New groups should be displayed until a new refresh of the current list is made.

To do so now the hostinfo.dat (with the current date) is only written if there is a complete new downloaded list:

+  if (!mGetOnlyNew && !mHostInfoLoaded)
+  {
+    rv = WriteHostInfoFile();
+    NS_ENSURE_SUCCESS(rv,rv);
+  }

Comment 16

[[e-mail]]

Comment on attachment 275697 [details] [diff] [review]
Patch 2

I still don't like the UI for this though.

Comment 17

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Landed on trunk.

Comment 18

[u60234]

Can we please get an l10n comment for
<!ENTITY currentListTab.accesskey     "L">

It may not be immediately obvious to a localizer that the chosen letter here must match two different strings in another file.

Comment 19

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Actually, that's a bug. Hasse, please file a new bug for that, blocking this one.

Comment 20

[Joe Sabash [:JoeS1]]

Thanks much for this "feature" seems to work fine in:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a8pre) Gecko/2007081804 Thunderbird/3.0a1pre ID:2007081804
One thing though, what ever happened to the message count column in the subscribe dialog. The only way you can see "activity" for a newsgroup is to subscrbe to it.
Or am I missing a hidden pref.

Comment 21

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> One thing though, what ever happened to the message count column in the
> subscribe dialog.

It has never been implemented yet, see bug 38906.

Comment 22

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Was there a reason to make it a new tab, instead of a button (like comment #12 suggests) or similar?

Comment 23

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> Was there a reason to make it a new tab, instead of a button 
> (like comment #12 suggests) or similar?

Sure: a button would just be awkward. 
And NS4 had a tab, too. ;-)

Markus and I talked about the alternatives before (tab, stateful aka radio button, checkbox) and different tabs are just more clear.
They avoid the "why don't I see any groups on my server?" problem best, imo.

Comment 24

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Maybe I'm just not getting what the "New" tab is supposed to show, but currently it seems to show all groups, just like the "Current Group List" tab. Is that intended or should it just show "newly added" groups (which would at least make some sense). This was for news.mozilla.org

Not that the whole Subscribe dialog is all that intuitive... The Subscribe/Unsubscribe buttons seem superfluous as we have the checkboxes + ok, and the Refresh button obviously doesn't fetch "new" groups from the server, so I have no idea what it actually does. 

Comment 25

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> Maybe I'm just not getting what the "New" tab is supposed to show, but
> currently it seems to show all groups, just like the "Current Group List" tab.
> Is that intended or should it just show "newly added" groups (which would at
> least make some sense). This was for news.mozilla.org

The list should show all groups added since you last did a refresh of your group list. That date is stored in the "lastgroupdate" line of your server's hostinfo.dat file. 
(We probably should show that date in the UI, I'll file a new bug for that.)

Try hitting 'refresh' on the list tab, your "lastgroupdate" line may be invalid.

Comment 26

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> (We probably should show that date in the UI, I'll file a new bug for that.)

That's already part of bug 339981.