"Abuse" of Contact User feature

[Curtis Hovey]

On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 13:05 -0200, Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 09:18:48AM -0500, Curtis Hovey wrote:
> > > Uhh, depending on what you mean by "flawed feature" I don't agree at
> > > all. If you're saying "this is a valid feature but we can't figure out a
> > > way to avoid random peopple spamming teams" then I'm in agreement.
> > 
> > No I'm saying:
> > 
> >         As a launchpad team member,
> >         I want to contact all the launchpad team members,
> >         to inform them of an important event.
> > 
> > We cannot use the team mailing list because the subscription is an
> > option.
> 
> I don't understand this sentence, but it mentions mailing lists, and
> very few teams have mailing lists. The key advantage of this feature is
> that it gives you a unified way to contact a team, regardless of what
> bits the team has screwed on.

Agreed.

I was trying to say in the "option" argument team members are not always
subscribed to a mailing list when one exists. We cannot rely on a
mailing list to contact the whole team.

> At any rate, I think I see one of the points you're trying to make --
> that a valid use case exists where a team member wants to contact other
> team members.
> 
> > The "spam" issue is only valid from the context of a non-member
> > contacting the team. I do not know of a reason why a non-member needs to
> > contact *every* team member.
> 
> I can't second-guess users either, but people use tools in unexpected
> ways and I think erring on the side of allowing more contact is not
> necessarily bad. I can come up with some strawmen at least:
> 
>     - User X visits a project page to figure out if a project that looks
>       interesting is still active; the project is owned by a team and he
>       wants to ask whether anybody's still working on it.
> 
>       You can argue that he should just contact the project owner.
> 
>     - Team X manager M wants to invite Team Y to be a member. He knows
>       that this effectively means that Team Y will get notifications
>       when Team X is involved, so he wants to make sure nobody's going
>       to freak out if it happens; he writes to Team Y and asks if that
>       sounds reasonable or not.
> 
>       You can argue that he should just ask Team Y's owner who in turn
>       can ask his team members. But Team Y's owner could only really
>       contact his team members if a contact-my-team feature exists.
> 
>     - User A wants to give a suggestion to the Launchpad engineers of a
>       new technology to use. He doesn't file a bug or a question because
>       it's not actually a bug or question; instead he writes to the team
>       and asks
> 
>       You can argue that this can go through the owner anyway.

Yes. The owner verses the whole team argument is really about how much
respect Launchpad looses because of a message is perceived to be spam.
If users accept that they will occasionally get a bogus message because
they are a member of a team, then there is no problem. Will Launchpad
users ask us to change the rules if a spammer sends three message to the
three largest teams in Launchpad?

I'm not convinced that sending a message to many people when a
discussion (with all members) is not possible is a good solution. That
is like dropping as many bombs as possible in hopes to hit a target. I
think it is easier for the person sending the message to know that
someone is responsible for replying. 

> >         As a user of the fnord PPAs,
> >         I want to contact the fnord PPA team,
> >         To as a question about the builds.
> 
> And this isn't a bad use case either, though again you can just contact
> the owner and have him relay.
> 
> It does sound like so far we've established valid use cases for:
> 
>     - Contacting all members within a team I'm a member of is valid.
>     - Contacting a team through its team owner (or admins)
> 
> Are there others?

Does this need to behave differently if the team has private membership?
I don't think so. Teams with private membership must enforce their own
rules to ensure that members do not divulge themselves. If non-members
can only contact the team owner, there is less chance for the team's
membership to be leaked.

-- 
__Curtis C. Hovey_________
http://launchpad.net/
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