627376 - Account settings behave the opposite way to what you would except

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Websites Graveyard :: drumbeat.org, defect)

Description

[Cillian O'Ruanaidh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101206 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.13
Build Identifier: https://github.com/paulosman/batucada/tree/4141bb22aaefd621fb027dbece2b9ad09bb5a523

When you check the box beside any of the 'Account Settings' for example 'Send me an email when someone starts following me.' you will not get that email. But the email *does* get sent when that checkbox is left unchecked.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Register account A and view 'account settings'. It appears as though no emails will be sent.
2. Register account B and start following A. Look at log to see unexpected email.
3. Sign in as A and check the box beside 'send me an email when someone starts following me' and save.
4. Sign in as B, unfollow and start following A again. Then check logs and you'll see no email was sent.


Expected Results:  
When you check any of the 'send me an email' settings for example '...when someone starts following you' you should receive an email when someone starts following you, not when the box is unchecked.

The default behaviour seems to be that when a user first registers they don't receive emails when people start following them, etc. And that they should have to opt-in to start receiving emails when someone starts following them etc. But this doesn't happen because of this bug. 

In the 'preferences_accountpreferences' table when you don't want to receive emails when someone starts following you a record is inserted with 'key=no_email_new_follower value=1' and when you do want to be emailed when you get a follower this record is deleted.

So do we want the default behaviour to be that they should have to opt-in to start receiving emails? If so that means when a user signs up we have to insert the following 3 'preferences_accountpreferences' records to get this default behaviour. 

'key=no_email_message_received value=1',
'key=no_email_new_follower value=1',
'key=no_email_new_project_follower value=1',

Is that okay or do we need to look at another way of handling preferences? What about changing those fields from 'no_email_new_follower' to 'email_new_follower'?

Comment 1

[Ned Schwartz]

I personally think that users should have some email notifications turned on when they first sign up.

I think we might want to add a remark that 

"
By default, you will receive email notifications when <certain actions occur>; to customize these notifications, or to turn them off, <a href="account settings url">go to your account settings</a>.
"

... to the welcome message.

And include information about how to disable notifications in each email as well.

Comment 2

[Paul Osman [:paulosman]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I personally think that users should have some email notifications turned on
> when they first sign up.

I agree, sending emails by default and then giving them an option to easily opt-out sounds fine to me. 

> I think we might want to add a remark that 
> 
> "
> By default, you will receive email notifications when <certain actions occur>;
> to customize these notifications, or to turn them off, <a href="account
> settings url">go to your account settings</a>.
> "
> 
> ... to the welcome message.
> 
> And include information about how to disable notifications in each email as
> well.

Or just a link to their account preferences in each email. That might seem more natural as it's a pretty common idiom.

Comment 3

[Ned Schwartz]

Good call;  we don't need to add weight to the welcome message and overwhelm. A link to the account page from the emails is what I had in mind as well. 

I do believe that twitter, as an example, shows you the notification settings during the sign up process. But we can think about a heavier sign up when and if there is user demand or confusion.

Comment 4

[Paul Osman [:paulosman]]

Fix has been pushed to master. I'll make a note in Bug # 623009 about pointing the user at their notification settings.