46315 - 3pane context menu: Newsgroup properties selected should match spec

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

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

Description

[Ninoschka Baca]

Build 2000-07-24-09M17: NT4, Mac 9.04
Havened checked Linux yet.

Overview: When a newsgroup is selected, the context menu should appear as:

Open in New Window
Unsubscribe
Mark Newsgroup Read
--------------------
Search Messages...
--------------------
Newsgroup Properties


For the product to match the spec the following should occur:

1. Change
a. "Unsubscribe From Newsgroup" should be "Unsubscribe"

2. Enable
a. Mark Newsgroup Read
b. Search Messages

3. Remove
a. Subscribe
b. Newsgroup Properties (Depends on bug# 10877 and bug# 32714/which has been 
futured)

Comment 1

[Ninoschka Baca]

*** Bug 43396 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[jglick]

I'm guessing properties are out.

Comment 3

[Ninoschka Baca]

Assigning to timeless.

Comment 4

[timeless]

ooh goody, bugs!

Comment 5

[lchiang]

per mail triage:  remove nsbeta3 nomination and move to future milestone.  For 
the short term, we will combine items here into three bugs (in 3pane) to address 
for nsbetat3:  1. delete, change text, move menuitems;  2. enable/disable and 
text changes on context (dynamic);  3.  accelerator keys to work (ie. what is 
shown in the menus actually does something)

When this bug gets revisited after the first release, we'll need to see what 
items remaining that need to be addressed.

Comment 6

[lchiang]

my mistake.  Correcting milestone back to previous one set.  Netscape6 doesn't 
need this by nsbeta3 so leaving the nsbeta3 nomination off.  This can be fixed 
at any time designated by timeless for Mozilla.

Comment 7

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

I can't find any "unsubscribe" entry in the newsgroups' context menu.
PC/Linux 2000091521. This is one of the most obvious bugs in Mozilla's
newsreader functionality (besides the fact that the newsreader functionality is
hard to find since "news" has been removed from the "Tasks" menu).
In fact, this problem has already been reported separately as bug 43396.
I strongly recommend fixing this for NS6. Voting.

Comment 8

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

Added rtm keyword to trigger evaluation.

Comment 9

[scottputterman]

All you have to do is hit the delete key, delete button, or delete menu item 
with a newsgroup selected.  It works just fine.

The fact that newsgroups isn't in the tasks menu really makes it harder for you?  
All you have to do is open up a newsgroup and select it.  It would be nice to 
have the menu item but I hardly think that it should be something that should 
block anyone.

Comment 10

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

Yes, it works just fine. Now that you tell me, I see :)

The problem is the following: I'm just a dumb user who regularly uses NN 4.x for
browsing and newsgroups, not for email. (Our sysadmin installed exmh here. It's
a Linux environment.)
Till recently, I only tested the Mozilla Browser because I couldn't figure out
how to get to the newsreader without specifying a POP-, IMAP- or whatever
server. I suspected that it was not hooked up yet on Linux because the
"Newsgroups" menu item in the Browser's "Tasks" menu was greyed out. Maybe I was
right with this assumption. Now lately, I observed that the "Newsgroups" item
had completely disappeared from that menu. "Why is that", I asked myself. "Maybe
there won't be any newsreader support in NS6 for Linux?" But because there was
no mentioning of this in the newsgroups, I searched for it elsewhere and finally
found the possibility to setup a newsgroups account in the "Mail" wizard. And I
was really pleased that newsgroups are working.
That's what I was referring to when I said that the newsreader functionality is
hard to find.

During setup, I had specified news.mozilla.org as my news server. No problem,
everything worked fine. Now to subscribe to some newsgroups, I used the context
menu's "Subscribe..." item, like I had done in 4.x. That worked fine, too. 
Then I discovered very soon that n.p.m.mstone is a very uninteresting newsgroup,
and I wanted to get rid of it. So how would I do this in 4.x? I would use the
context menu's "Unsubscribe" item. But... no such item... so what? I looked into
some regular menu items, but no mention of unsubscribe there. 
So it must be a bug in mozilla. I searched for all bugs (open ones as well as
resolved ones) with the word "unsubscribe" in the summary, and came up with no
less than 15 hits, many of them saying "cannot unsubscribe from newsgroup".
One of them even mentioned the term "context menu":
Bug 43396 "3pane: Unsubscribe should be available for context menu", a dup of
this one.

That how it happened. So why didn't I find any of the "right ways" to do it?
- the "Delete" button: very simple. I had not used *any* of these buttons in
4.x, and I just had no reason to assume I'd have to use them in Mozilla. I had
learned that the buttons' functionality is always available elsewhere.
- the Edit/Delete menu entry, or the delete key: Don't know, but I guess the
thing is that I didn't subscribe to the newsgroups by selecting "Insert" or
pressing the insert key. I had used the "Subscribe" context menu entry, and I
was just looking for the opposite to get rid of it again. For me, mail and news
are two completely different things, so I did not connect "Delete folder" with
anything near newsgroups.

To summarize: it's just a usability problem, most likely for those who are used
to 4.x, and especially for those who don't use it for mail as well.
Now that I know the solution, it's no problem for me any more, and I wouldn't
mind you removing the rtm keyword again. But since the functionality is already
there, the question is: Is it easier to add another context menu item, or to
deal with the dumb users like me who can't find a way to unsubscribe from
newsgroups in NS6?

Comment 11

[scottputterman]

Andreas,

I didn't mean to imply you were a dumb user. I'm sorry if my comments came 
across that way.

I guess because I'm so used to using Netscape mail and news, that I've always 
felt that the tasks menuitem was just an extra convenience since all it did was 
select your default news server.  But I can see your point. Anyway, as of the 
implementation of the tasks menu we didn't have the notion of a default 
newsserver and it was just easier to have users use the 3pane and then select a 
newsgroup themselves.

Now, as for the context menu, quite honestly, we didn't have unsubscribe 
functionality from the 3pane UI at the time the context menus were written. When 
that functionality was written we never went back and added the context menu or 
main menuitems.  It does work with delete and I admit it's not the most obvious 
thing. Though, luckily it should work with the delete key which may be a 
reasonable way to do this.

anyway, once again, I didn't mean to imply you were dumb. There's a lot of 
things we didn't implement and I've gotten so used to workarounds that I figured  
everyone else on mozilla had gotten used to them too.  What you want is the 
preferred way of doing things, we just haven't had time to do the preferred way 
for many things.

Comment 12

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

> I didn't mean to imply you were a dumb user. I'm sorry if my comments came 
> across that way.

No, they didn't come across that way. I should have used some more smilies ...
;-)

Comment 13

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

My suggestion for the "Tasks" menu would just be to rename "Mail" to "Mail &
News". But I think this would be offtopic here. Should I file an RFE for that?

Comment 14

[timeless]

To summarize: I know this is a problem; I've been awake for many hours. I'll 
fix this [soon, m19 ish, maybe sooner if i wake up tonight]. Please don't do 
random rambling here, that's my job. To ramble use the newsgroups ;-)

As for unsubscribe, you /should/ also be able to do that in the subscribe 
dialog.

The reason we removed News from tasks is we couldn't figure out what to show. 
Eventually a default news server setting was found somewhere... I think that's 
helpwanted. And i have many other bugs to worry about.

We have a spec that says Mail. Don't file another bug, just find the bug that 
got Newsgroups removed [and help fix it ;-)].

Comment 15

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

not going to happen for ns 6.0 rtm.

Comment 16

[timeless]

*** Bug 57707 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 17

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

*** Bug 39514 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

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

*** Bug 60982 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 19

[Simon Lucy]

I'm willing to take on some of this, I've worked on context menu changes and
accelerators in the navigator xul for my own client builds.

Comment 20

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

Timeless - Seth, is it alright if Simon takes a whack at this?  Can we re-assign
it to him?

Comment 21

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

Simon offered to take this, I'm re-assigning to him.  Thanks Simon!

Comment 22

[Simon Lucy]

Attachment: Patches to implement context menu for newsgroup folders

Comment 23

[Simon Lucy]

The patches in the diff include a Unsubscribe() function in mailcommands.js as a
generalised method of Unsubscribing as there wasn't one that I found.  The
MsgUnsubscribe() also needs to be hooked into a confirmation dialog.

The context menu includes Create Subfolder, whether this is valid or not I'm
unsure. I can see how a general folder underneath a newsgroup would be2 useful
if one could store arbitrary files and content in them.  At the moment nothing
happens if its selected so the assumption could be that it is invalid.

Comment 24

[Simon Lucy]

Attachment: updated patch without Create New Folder enabled...

Comment 25

[Simon Lucy]

Attachment: Cleaned up diff run with diff -u3

Comment 26

[Simon Lucy]

Attachment: updated patch with confirmation dialog

Comment 27

[timeless]

tabs are bad :-(

Comment 28

[Simon Lucy]

In what way?  Since I have tabs set to 4 I don't see a problem.  I did see 
inconsistencies in the tabbing before I patched it.

Comment 29

[timeless]

sorry, i must have been tired. r=timeless

Comment 30

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

Mscott, putterman, seeking an sr=  Thanks.

Comment 31

[Scott MacGregor]

I'd like to get Seth to review this before we do a super review. He'll be back
in town by Thursday.

Comment 32

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

back from vacation.  I'll start reviewing it now.

Comment 33

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

Attachment: new patch, same alert text as 4.x "Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from <>?"

Comment 34

[David :Bienvenu]

sr=bienvenu

Comment 35

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

this patch needs more work.  looks at the spec
(http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/threepane/MailMenus.html#Context)

the current patch will remove "Subscribe" from the context menus *except* for
when the current selection is a news server.

I've fixed it so "Subscribe" always shows up.

jglick:  is the spec up to date?  subscribe works for imap, there is a comment
in the spec about that.

until I hear back, I'm going to add "Subscribe" back for all cases.

new patch coming soon.

Comment 36

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

Attachment: new patch, add "Subscribe..." back

Comment 37

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

fixed.

thanks for the patch.

Comment 38

[Ninoschka Baca]

Build 2001-01-2204: NT4, Mac 9.04
Waiting on a newer linux build

* When a newsgroup is selected the context menu currently shows:
- Open in Ne(w) Mail Window
- Su(b)scribe
- (U)nsubscribe
- (G)et Messages for Account
- Mar(k) Newsgroup Read
-------------------------
- (S)earch Messages
- Pr(o)perties

Concerns:
- The "Get Messages for Account" item was not discussed in this bug and is not 
mentioned in the spec. Should it be there? If so then it also needs to be added 
to the spec.
- When udpating the spec also update the mnemonics if what I've listed is 
correct. It makes sense to me.

Comment 39

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

vrfy fixed on linux 2001.01.23.10 [commercial verif bits] --ie, i see what nbaca
saw for winNT and mac.