Option to *selectively* not send email notifications on ticket change

[Ryan J Ollos]

Overview: It would be nice to have the option to not send an email to users on the notification list (owner, reporter, CC list) when updating a ticket with insignificant changes.

Use case: we work with several external vendors who do not have logins for our trac instance, but are often added to a ticket's CC list. Typically an email discussion will go on outside of Trac, and I will end up pasting each email into the Trac comment history for the relevant ticket.

When I add the emails to the comment history, the owner, reporter, and CC list all receive notifications of the changes to the tickets ... but they typically have already seen the email so it is just a nuisance to them to receive a notification when I paste the email into the ticket history. Particularly for the vendors, they are on the CC list and therefore get notified when I paste their own email into the ticket change history.

Furthermore, what sometimes happens is that there are so many emails pasted into the ticket history and resulting notifications that users get in the habit of deleting a bunch of ticket notifications and miss important notifications. Imagine I paste 10 emails into the change history, and then write a summary. The typically user looks at the first 2 or 3 notifications and then seeing that the information is redundant, deletes the rest of them.

Enhancement: A checkbox Don't send change notification that is unselected by default and appears next to the Submit Change button.

This feature would work nicely in conjunction with Ticket #4269. That way you get a nice summary of if and to whom emails where sent.

[Ryan J Ollos]

Some of the functionality of FlexibleReporterNotificationPlugin may be related. I think I will start here if I have time to work on this hack.

[Ryan J Ollos]

I've requested this enhancement into core Trac as well. See Edgewall ​Ticket 8607.

[J Evan S]

Couple of ideas you may have already thought of. You could install Email2Trac and encourage discussions /in/ the ticket. Or you could attach the emails - Trac doesn't usually send notifications for attachments.

[Ryan J Ollos]

Replying to jevans:

Couple of ideas you may have already thought of. You could install Email2Trac and encourage discussions /in/ the ticket. Or you could attach the emails - Trac doesn't usually send notifications for attachments.

Either I don't follow, or you are missing my intent. My goal is to be able to update a ticket without having an email sent to everyone that is subscribed to the ticket. For instance, suppose I want to retarget many ticket to a different milestone, but I don't want a notification sent for each ticket that I change. As the admin, I'd like to have the option to update the ticket without sending a notification.

[J Evan S]

Replying to rjollos:

Replying to jevans:

Couple of ideas you may have already thought of. You could install Email2Trac and encourage discussions /in/ the ticket. Or you could attach the emails - Trac doesn't usually send notifications for attachments.

Either I don't follow, or you are missing my intent. My goal is to be able to update a ticket without having an email sent to everyone that is subscribed to the ticket. For instance, suppose I want to retarget many ticket to a different milestone, but I don't want a notification sent for each ticket that I change. As the admin, I'd like to have the option to update the ticket without sending a notification.

Well I agree about wanting a way as admin to not send notifications for things such as fixing typos. (I've found I can 'batch modify' a single ticket for the fields that supports, and the TicketChangePlugin also doesn't send notifications.)

For your case, you had mentioned email conversations taking place outside of Trac. I thought perhaps you could use Email2Trac to move those conversations into Trac. Then you wouldn't need to add them after the fact.

[Ryan J Ollos]

Replying to jevans:

For your case, you had mentioned email conversations taking place outside of Trac. I thought perhaps you could use Email2Trac to move those conversations into Trac. Then you wouldn't need to add them after the fact.

Yeah, I have been wanting to implement something like this. Your idea sounds good. Are you using Email2Trac to do this in your Trac instance?

[J Evan S]

Replying to rjollos:

Replying to jevans:

For your case, you had mentioned email conversations taking place outside of Trac. I thought perhaps you could use Email2Trac to move those conversations into Trac. Then you wouldn't need to add them after the fact.

Yeah, I have been wanting to implement something like this. Your idea sounds good. Are you using Email2Trac to do this in your Trac instance?

Unfortunately no, that's still on my to-do list.

[Ryan J Ollos]

Feature request implemented by the QuietPlugin.

[anonymous]

I wouldn't say this request is fulfilled by QuietPlugin. I don't think this feature should have dependencies on another plugin such as Announcer*.

I believe there should simply be an additional button when submitting comments called "Submit Changes Silently" or something to that effect.

Thoughts?

[Jared]

Replying to anonymous:

I wouldn't say this request is fulfilled by QuietPlugin. I don't think this feature should have dependencies on another plugin such as Announcer*.

I believe there should simply be an additional button when submitting comments called "Submit Changes Silently" or something to that effect.

Thoughts?

The comment above is mine. I forgot to log in.

[Ryan J Ollos]

The AnnouncerPlugin infrastructure is being integrated into Trac (see ​trac:TracDev/Proposals/AdvancedNotification), so it may well be the future of notification in Trac. It's not clear to me that the existing notification infrastructure has the hooks that are needed to implement notification muting. See also ​trac:#8607. You may want to keep that in mind when considering whether to put effort into writing a plugin for the existing Trac notification architecture. Enhancements to the QuietPlugin would also be welcomed, but I doubt we will make the effort to try and make it work without the AnnouncerPlugin.

[Ryan J Ollos]

Closing since AnnouncerPlugin architecture is being integrated to the Trac core. QuietPlugin can be updated for the Trac 1.2 version of AnnouncerPlugin if necessary.