1722738 - Improve the wording of "Party crashing? You are not on the guest list yet. Respond as: ..." - too sloppy, not really true, actual cause unclear

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Calendar :: E-mail based Scheduling (iTIP/iMIP), enhancement, P2)

Description

[Paul van der Vlis]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

I clicked to accept an calendar invite ("uitnodiging")

Actual results:

I did get an pop-up

Feestje verstoren?
U staat nog niet op de gastenlijst
Reageren als:

Expected results:

I should get a normal response.
"Feestje verstoren?" Means "Disrupt party?" in English.

Comment 1

[Onno Ekker [:nONoNonO UTC+1]]

The English text from which this is translated reads:

Party crashing?
You are not on the guest list yet.
Respond as:

I don't think this is a localization error, if it's an error at all. It looks like the invite was to different mail address then the one you have configured in your calendar and you get prompted to respond with the mail address that was in the invite.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Good day Paul, thank you for your feedback!
I guess we were trying to make it sound a bit jovial and colloquial, lighter so to speak.
Maybe it's a bit too light now, because the actual problem (mismatch between invited email address and responding email address which will also get added to the organizer's list of event participants) may not be quite clear to the general user.
Given that users usually haven't done anything wrong when this occurs and the problem isn't easy to understand, maybe the sloppy wording isn't helpful (although personally I wouldn't mind).

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Party crashing is exactly that: coming to an event uninvited. Maybe it has a bad translation?
That is only the title though of course, and the text does explain what is happening.

Comment 4

[Gaetano Giunta]

Hello.
Since TB 91 (or 91.1), i started getting this warning on a lot of calendar invites where my email address is in fact in the attendee list.
I do have many email addresses set up in TB, as well as multiple calendars, which might be the reason for the issue, but it definitely was not happening beforehand.
Will create a separate ticket about the problem...

Comment 5

[Gaetano Giunta]

PS: sorry if this is OT for this ticket. New one is 1731616

Comment 7

[Robert Rothenberg]

See bug 1754884. The wording is inappropriate for some invites, e.g. a funeral or business meeting. I would suggest that it should not try to be cute. Simply saying "The invite was sent to a different email address" is enough.

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot 1: Current "Party crashing" dialogue in context

So here's the dialog for which we want a better and more informative wording...

Comment 9

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot 2: critical user feedback from Twitter

Jason had some critical user feedback from Twitter today which confirms my QA/UX analysis from comment 2: The current title and text of the dialog is just inappopriate (think business meetings), confusing, and doesn't explain the actual problem well at all - after all, you are on the guest list, you are invited (so you are not party-crashing), but you're just about to answer with a different email address of yours which may mess things up for both you (attendee's privacy) and the organizer (who will find an unknown email in his guest list).

Essentially we're just looking for a better and more informative wording.

So Jason was asking on TB Comms if we can escalate this bug?

Comment 10

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

^^

Comment 11

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #9)

Jason had some critical user feedback from Twitter today which confirms my QA/UX analysis from comment 2: The current title and text of the dialog is just inappopriate (think business meetings), confusing, and doesn't explain the actual problem well at all

Hah, who said business needs to be all stiff! ;-)

• after all, you are on the guest list, you are invited (so you are not party-crashing), but you're just about to answer with a different email address of yours which may mess things up for both you (attendee's privacy) and the organizer (who will find an unknown email in his guest list).

That's a lot of assumptions. I don't think we can say if any of that is true. What "you" is, is an identity. If you even got the invite as a direct email, it's perfectly possible, likely even, that it would be seen as party crashing by the inviter. He sent something to Alice, and all the sudden get a reply from Bob who he didn't knew existed. What would he do with this info?
AFAIK the standards doesn't allow for a workflow where you can change identity like that.

Comment 12

[Robert Rothenberg]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #11)

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #9)

Jason had some critical user feedback from Twitter today which confirms my QA/UX analysis from comment 2: The current title and text of the dialog is just inappopriate (think business meetings), confusing, and doesn't explain the actual problem well at all

Hah, who said business needs to be all stiff! ;-)

It's not a matter of being "stiff". I had the same issue show up for an invite to a funeral. There are a lot of sombre occasions where that wording is in bad taste.

More explicit wording along the lines of "This invite was sent to a different email address than you are responding from. Were you actually invited to this event?" explains what the issue is, without trying to be cute or funny.

Comment 13

[Gaetano Giunta]

Even leaving aside the context of a specific invitation, the current wording might not be easily understood, and perceived as slightly accusatory, by non-native english speakers, eg. "why is the app telling me I am breaking something / act inappropriately?".

Also, this message will never be seen by the inviter, so I do not think we should care about that aspect much, if at all - or is this ticket about making TB handle this scenario in a smarter way and try to do the right thing, instead of being just about changing the message's wording?

Comment 14

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Re non-native speakers: there are localized builds, and I'm sure localizers can find appropriate verbiage for their language.

The inviter will not see the message, but only the result, which is party crashing. Sending from a non-invited address is inappropriate in most occasions.

Comment 15

[Robert Rothenberg]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #14)

The inviter will not see the message, but only the result, which is party crashing. Sending from a non-invited address is inappropriate in most occasions.

No, it is not "party crashing". Most events aren't parties.

Simply tell people that the invite was sent to a different address.

Comment 16

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #11)

(In reply to Thomas D. (:thomas8) from comment #9)

Jason had some critical user feedback from Twitter today which confirms my QA/UX analysis from comment 2: The current title and text of the dialog is just inappopriate (think business meetings), confusing, and doesn't explain the actual problem well at all

Hah, who said business needs to be all stiff! ;-)

Good point! :-)
However, the funerals and many other occasions certainly are, and they are not "parties" - so the idiomatic English phrase won't work well when it gets translated, and localizers won't easily find a better translation as we don't explain what the problem is.

• after all, you are on the guest list, you are invited (so you are not party-crashing), but you're just about to answer with a different email address of yours which may mess things up for both you (attendee's privacy) and the organizer (who will find an unknown email in his guest list).

That's a lot of assumptions. I don't think we can say if any of that is true.

??

What "you" is, is an identity. If you even got the invite as a direct email, it's perfectly possible, likely even, that it would be seen as party crashing by the inviter. He sent something to Alice, and all the sudden get a reply from Bob who he didn't knew existed. What would he do with this info?
AFAIK the standards doesn't allow for a workflow where you can change identity like that.

Good point which just complements what I'm saying. We totally agree that answering with a different email than the one invited is bad practice, may violate invitee's privacy, and will confuse the organizer - and yes, the organizer may well perceive it as party crashing. However, as others have pointed out, it's not nice for Thunderbird to use language which might be understood as unexpectedly blaming the user for "party crashing" without explaining the underlying email address problem which may create this impression in the first place.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #14)

Re non-native speakers: there are localized builds, and I'm sure localizers can find appropriate verbiage for their language.

We already have evidence (e.g. for NL in comment 0) that translations are struggling with this idiomatic phrase, which won't make it any better.
But that's not even the most important point. The point is, we don't sufficiently explain in normal words what the actual problem is: A problem about mismatch of email addresses used in the invite vs. the one you're about to use for sending. The lack of explanation makes the dialog vague and confusing as users are reporting here.

The inviter will not see the message, but only the result, which is party crashing. Sending from a non-invited address is inappropriate in most occasions.

True, it's inappropriate. I'd maintain that the real-life person who is invited is de facto not party crashing (because they have been invited), but only using a wrong email address, which in the end makes it look as if they are party-crashing. I think the subtle difference may matter for how we should communicate this in the dialog.

(In reply to Robert Rothenberg from comment #12)

More explicit wording along the lines of "This invite was sent to a different email address than you are responding from. [snip]" explains what the issue is, without trying to be cute or funny.

Yes, some wording along those lines would be much better.

"Were you actually invited to this event?"

No, we can safely assume that the person was invited.

Comment 17

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Tentative suggested rewording for the party crashing dialog:

[e-mail] is not on the list of participants - change sender?

You are about to reply to this invitation using [e-mail], the email address of the calendar you chose for this event. However, the invitation was sent to a different email address of yours. To protect your privacy and avoid confusion, you should try to use the email address the invitation was sent to.

Reply as:
....

Thoughts?

I understand that we're not always able to know for sure which email address the invite has been sent to (e.g., there might be email forwarding at play before the message reaches TB). But we know which address the user is about to reply from, and (correct me if I'm wrong), I understand we're just comparing that with the list of all participants of the event, and if there's no match, fire the party crashing dialog (Disclaimer: I haven't verified this in code).

Comment 18

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

This will be discussed as part of the calendar dialog work in February.

Comment 19

[Andy]

Just had this message now. To a native British English speaker It's completely inappropriate. I am not attending a "party", let alone "crashing" one, and it's very unlikely that the attendees for an online meeting would ever be referred to as a "guest list".

Are the results of the work in February referred to above written up yet and available anywhere?

Comment 20

[Robert Rothenberg]

Any news on this?

Comment 21

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Sol, can you take care of this with a quick string change?
Update this string https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/calendar/locales/en-US/calendar/calendar-itip-identity-dialog.ftl#5 to use "Uninvited guest"

Comment 22

[solange]

Attachment: Bug 1722738 - Remove the 'Party crashing?' word and improve the strings of the itip identity dialog. r=#thunderbird-reviewers.

Comment 23

[Robert Rothenberg]

"Uninvited guest" is not appropriate either. The person may well have been invited.

The email address that they are responding from is different from the email address that was invited.

Be specific about the cause of the error.

Comment 24

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

The specificity is reported in the dialog body as "You are not on the guest list yet."
The string change is just the dialog and we're doing it to avoid wrong language that doesn't apply to all situation (wedding, funeral, etc).
It's a dialog title, verbosity is not good to have there.
This dialog will also be dropped later as we move to a modal popup, so this is also temporary.

Comment 25

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/cb0644e72075
Remove the 'Party crashing?' word and improve the strings of the itip identity dialog. r=aleca