1273014 - "Website Updates" notifications are mysterious and irrelevant (e.g. a young woman's tumblr page with some random selfies)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1263969

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Just received the following "Website Updates" Notification from Firefox (Nightly) for Android:

> bulletproof in black like a funeral
> Hi instagram it's me #selfie #asian #isthisacuteposeornah
http://shialabeowulf.tumblr.com/post/144391083270/hi-instagram-its-me-selfie-asian

It's just someone's tumblr page (which I've never visited before AFAIK), with some selfie photos.
 
Why is Firefox for Android spamming me with a notification that I should go look at these random selfies on this random tumblr page?  This is *SUPER* mysterious and confusing.

(And potentially relationship-trouble-causing, though fortunately not in my case -- "Honey, why does your phone have a random notification pointing to this young woman's photos?" / "No idea, I've never seen that page before in my life!" / "Hmmm...")

I'm open to the idea that Firefox for Android might feed me useful URLs / blog-updates based on my interests or something (I think that's what this feature is?), but in this case I have literally zero idea why it thinks this tumblr page is an appropriate thing to spam to our users.

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Attachment: screenshot of the notification

Comment 2

[:Margaret Leibovic]

Thanks for filing. The logic to show notifications is based off of RSS feeds of pages you've bookmarked. There should be a "Learn more" link in settings to explain this, but I see the SUMO article doesn't have any content yet.

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Thanks - to my surprise, I do actually have one post from this tumblr in my bookmarks - this page:

http://shialabeowulf.tumblr.com/post/33670447154/99-life-hacks-to-make-your-life-easier

So i suppose that somewhat explains where this notification came from.

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(And i forgot to mention - i did click through to that "learn more" link, and was frustrated by its emptiness. We definitely need to add some content to that SUMO article, or do something else to better-explain/demystify these notifications. Otherwise we risk scaring off Nightly users with bizarre potentially-spammy-seeming unexplained notifications, IMO.)

Comment 5

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Note also that my bookmark -- comment 3 -- is a post from late 2012, and I doubt I've visited this particular domain since then.  So, the notification was completely out of the blue and unfamiliar.

When Firefox decides which (if any) existing bookmarks would merit being promoted to "Website Update" notifications, it seems like pagevisit-frecency would be an important & worthwhile metric to use.  That would have prevented my confusing experience (sudden unexpected notification spawned by a one-off long-forgotten bookmark not visited in years).

Comment 6

[:Margaret Leibovic]

(In reply to Daniel Holbert [:dholbert] from comment #5)
> Note also that my bookmark -- comment 3 -- is a post from late 2012, and I
> doubt I've visited this particular domain since then.  So, the notification
> was completely out of the blue and unfamiliar.
> 
> When Firefox decides which (if any) existing bookmarks would merit being
> promoted to "Website Update" notifications, it seems like pagevisit-frecency
> would be an important & worthwhile metric to use.  That would have prevented
> my confusing experience (sudden unexpected notification spawned by a one-off
> long-forgotten bookmark not visited in years).

I think this is a great point for improving this heuristic.

I think we should consider disabling content notifications on Nightly until they can get some more active development cycles.

Comment 7

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to :Margaret Leibovic from comment #6)
> I think we should consider disabling content notifications on Nightly until
> they can get some more active development cycles.

Agreed. Filed bug 1275418.

(This bug here might end up just wanting to be duped to bug 1263969 or another similar bug.)

Comment 9

[:Margaret Leibovic]

We're disabling this, so we don't need to track it.