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Maniphest T4258

Unify subscription of mailing lists to projects
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Description

Several projects subscribe their mailing lists to Phabricator projects, in order to get email notifications about new patch reviews and other content. This is done by creating a special "mailing list" account, and subscribing it.

However, the way the account is subscribed to reviews currently differs. For example, in the Frameworks project, the mailing list is simply a member of the project, but in KDevelop, there is a Herald rule to add the mailing list account as a subscriber to any new reviews in the project. The Herald rule for KDEPIM is similar, but it also seems to redundantly add the project tag (even though having the tag is necessary for the rule to run!).

This should be unified and cleaned up. Herald has performance consequences and it's harder to use, and probably overkill for this purpose, so we should switch them all to having the mailing list as a member of the project. Note that by default this will send email for all activity, ie. both reviews and tasks, but apparently the ML account can be configured in the user settings to only get emails for one or the other.

nalvarez created this task.Nov 4 2016, 6:25 PM
Restricted Application added a subscriber: sysadmin. · View Herald TranscriptNov 4 2016, 6:25 PM
bcooksley added a subscriber: bcooksley.Nov 29 2016, 8:40 AM

In relation to those rules - reviews don't inherit the projects of the repositories they're for by default. The PIM rule therefore isn't duplicative - Repository projects literally means the projects the repository has, rather than the projects the review has.

Guess this is something we need to discuss - do we want to ensure reviews have the Project added? If we don't add the Project then having the mailing list added to the Project is of no use, as reviews won't be sent to them (unless the user adds the Project themselves, something which is a touch prone to failure me thinks - and what happens with Reviewboard currently)

Thoughts? Note that the number of actions in a Herald rule doesn't have a huge performance impact from my understanding of things - it's the rule evaluation where the penalty lies.

bcooksley closed this task as Resolved.May 9 2018, 9:40 AM
bcooksley claimed this task.

Due to the flood of notifications and the enormous amount of excess mail that subscribing projects instead of mailing lists generates, it's been decided to just subscribe mailing lists.
Projects will still be added to reviews so people can filter within Phabricator.