No new activity = no email?

Agree with Rich. What if there is no new activity? Can we make it so it doesn't send the email?

Ok I've pushed the change so that no activity with mean no email.
It's pushed to origin- not loomio-production yet.

@benjaminknight I agree that will happen a lot.. But I don't think it should hold up this proposal.

Did anyone else just get a proposal closing soon email for this proposal? I think I set it to close at 11pm tonight. So its more or less 12 hours from now. Does that feel like the right about of time for this notification to other people? I think it's right for me.. but I can understand if people think it is a little bit short/late

Will the first email that goes out explain what has happened and how to change the settings if they want to? (Or is that just included as end of message blurb?)

@billy Nope - Good point. We should write an email to go out to everyone to explain the new features and how to opt out.

I actually just changed the format of it. It's now looping by group first, then showing decisions and discussions per group.

I'm out of control and I'll stop

Also the date in the subject is way off.. so I've changed the subject line to read:

Loomio - Summary of the last 24 hours

@danfinlay we will have a 'Modify your email preferences' link at the bottom. You will need to be already signed in.. or sign in then though. I hear you - a one click unsubscribe would be good.

Ok so you should have a version with the new format today. What do you think?

Would really like to see a clear and easy unsubscribe button before rolling out, to avoid mass frustration

Hey @robertguthrie, you probably know already, but the link at the bottom of the email currently take you to user settings not email preferences.

@aaronthornton Nup I had not realised. I'll change the wording to 'Unsubscribe or modify your email preferences' and make the link use the single access token so people don't need to be logged in. Then I think we're ready to go.

Love you @robertguthrie

I love @robertguthrie also! I reckon the Closing Soon emails are all good to push to default on, and that the daily summary will be as soon as there's easy unsubscribe!

The Closing soon notifications are SO VERY HELPFUL already!

Lovers and coders, I have finished the unsubscribe stuff.
@jonlemmon @aaronthornton

Can we please have a meeting to clear the outstanding pull requests tomorrow?

Or .. rather than use a google survey.. can we handle the discussion/decision involving the users, with loomio?

Sorry guys, I should not have closed the last decision.

So.. I think we'll all agree that we should email and explain the new features. Should I make that a motion by itself?

Finally another motion on what the new defaults should be..

Awesome idea about the survey! I reckon we just use surveymonkey for now. And in the future it would obviously be really cool if we can use Loomio directly for this sort of stuff.

Unless you can think of a way @robertguthrie to use Loomio immediately for the survey? I think it would be hard right now unless we had a group with every single user in it. But that presents a few problems at the moment.

From my group's listserv:

The main problem is that the default email preference for Loomio seems to be "Send me a daily activity email summarising what’s been happening in my groups" - which is just insane.

The group is getting discontent with loomio, they don't want emails they didn't ask for. That said, a single email clarifying preferences could be ok.

Hey Dan - the decision under consideration right now is to send one email out to users to ask them what they want the default email preferences to be - it's not a decision about setting an email-on default.

Given your comment below it sounds like sending out a survey probably isn't something you disagree with?

Hi @danfinlay one of your group members sent through a the whole exchange to the [email protected] inbox. Reading through, it seems the root of the problem was that the user received the summary email without having ever accepted the invite email.

If that's the case that's a big bad bug that we need to squish asap.

The invite system sux ass. IMO we should not create user records until people accept their invitation.

Personally I would find it weird getting an email asking me to fill out a survey about what I think defaults should be; it seems more normal just to explain the settings, what the default is, and how to change it, and then monitor how many users change it, and what the dominant pattern of settings is, and then set that as default...

@billy I think the wording of the proposal could be improved: instead of asking the user what they think the defaults should be, we can simply ask them what settings they would like for themselves.

Your method of passively monitoring user behaviour would certainly work, but the survey is a way of announcing 'you are actively participating in the development of this tool'.

I agree with billy. I felt there was something weird about asking people what the defaults should be when I created the proposal but I knew it would be popular around here. (and I just want to be popular.. after all)

I think we need to be smarter than "here are a bunch of individual choices" and think about this in terms of a few objectives:

• Retaining users and their group engagement
• Being cautious not to flood a user's inbox
• Ensuring that critical information gets noticed.

My interpretation of that means a default selection of the following enabled:
*Daily Activity Summary
*Mention Notifications (probably)
*Proposal closing soon notifications

And discussion and motion notification emails disabled by default.

My reasoning is that if a group has a busy day the volume of emails going out would increase if one were subscribed to new discussion/motion notifications. However the volume of email is constant, limited to 1 or 0, if the user is just instead told about the activity via the summary email.

Notifying people about motions closing is essential to successful engagement, as is being able to mention people and expect that they are notified.

@richardd.bartlett - if we are going to ask the user what their own email preferences are in survey form, would it be easier to just give them a link and let them set them straight away?

Would selecting your preference in a survey immediately update your preferences as such or is that a two step process?

Got this message today:

"You guys should allow unsubscription (from everything) right from the email. And you must allow unsubscribe by email

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act stipulates that your unsubscribe function needs to be clear and conspicuous, free, likely to be functional for at least 30 days after the original message is sent, and able to be sent using the same method of communication that was used to send the original message. Source"

The daily notifications you've created is potentially helpful to heavy users, and not nearly as annoying as unsolicited self-promotion "newsletter" emails (please don't ever make these a default I have to opt-out of - news is what blogs are for). But I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Email pollution sucks. I get enough email without daily notifications from web apps, which I'm using instead of email lists precisely to reduce my email flow.
I suggest:
* when new users get their confirmation email, it offers to subscribe them to any email notifications, with the default being NO EMAIL.
* when users join a new group, they get a confirmation email, pointing out that keeping track of the activity in multiple Loomio groups might be assisted by email notifications, and again offering them an opt-in. Again, default being NO EMAIL.

It would be awesome if a user could set the email notification to arrive every x days (x = whatever number of days suits the way they want to use Loomio). What would be even more awesome would be if the user could set the notification frequency for each group in a dynamic way.

Every group I'm part of has busy times, when important decisions need to be made urgently and I want to know what's happening every day, and other times there's not much to discuss, and I might only need to check in once a month. I'm imagining an email frequency screen which lists all my groups (and a search field at the top which I can start typing a group name into to bring it to the top), with a slider for each one which can be positioned on a spectrum between "busy" and "dormant". The list could be alphabetized, or in order of "busyness" with the ability to toggle between busiest at the top, and most dormant at the top.

I agree with you Strypey insofar as you represent a significant user group, i.e. those that have too much traffic in their inbox.

What we have to consider is another user group who are not suffering from overloaded inboxes. I would guess a significant portion of this group would have a relatively low technical competency, and are likely to be more comfortable operating in an email context than any web app.

Engaging these people is crucial. The question of where to set the defaults is about striking the balance between engaging people and annoying them.

Perhaps the solution is to give group admins the ability to set the defaults for their group, e.g. diaspora or FLOSS Coop might set their defaults to All Off, whereas a group of less technically proficient users might have better engagement with All On.

FYI the ability for users to set their email settings at a per-group level is nearly ready for deploy

I would go for default emails on, with VERY clear ways to opt out, simply because the people who most need email notifications are exactly the ones who wouldn't be able to figure out how to turn them on, and the people who would want them turned off are exactly the kind of people who can handle an unsubscribe function or adjust their preferences with no trouble.

Also just while we are tinkering with email settings: I get emailed every time there is a new discussion or proposal in one of my groups, but there seems to be nowhere to change that setting...

@richardd.bartlett @alannakrause
Are you getting user feedback to this effect? To me it seems counterintuitive. If I was less technically experienced, I'd be less able to use filters and folders and other tools to keep the email flood manageable, less confident to opt-out of emails. In that case, I think unsolicited emails, particularly daily ones, would annoy me even more!

One email that gives one-click opt-ins to various email notifications, and a link to the email management panel, has got to be easier and less annoying than multiple emails with opt-out links. It has been a standard part of email etiquette since the Ark that ongoing email should be opt-in, not opt-out.

@billy we're in the process of implementing that at the moment.

@strypey I think it's definitely easier for technically literate people to turn emails off than it is for non-techies to turn emails on. However, agree that it's worth having a good think about opt-in versus opt-out.

@jonlemmon
"I think it's definitely easier for technically literate people to turn emails off than it is for non-techies to turn emails on."

So you keep saying. Why?

@strypey Well, it's just my opinion so don't take it too seriously. We probably should conduct some user-interviews to see how users would actually behave. But my experience tells me that non-techies are scared of anything on their computer that isn't their email and will click as few links/buttons as possible. So even "click this link to start receiving emails" seems like a stretch to me.

@jonlemmon
Yes, I think some newbie interviews would be the way to determine what scares them the least ;)

While we're on the subject, one thing that I find mildly annoying about the current email notification set-up. When I follow a link from an email, it takes me to the relevant discussion page, so far so good. Then I login, so I can make a comment, or take a position, and it takes me to... another page.

It would be awesome if the system detected that I'd followed the link from the email (because each link has a unique security ID), and logged me in automatically. Failing that, at least redirect me back to the page I was looking at when I went to sign in? Cheers :)

BTW It's been far too long since I told you guys that Loomio is bloody wicked. I looked at what Diaspora has achieved in 3 years, with funding in the hundreds of thousands. IMHO it doesn't hold a candle to what you guys have achieved already. How did you go it? Simple, You've built your open source community right from the word go, including interested coders and end-users in the devel process right from day one. Loomio rocks!

I am happy to seek some opinions, via in-person interviews (and possibly to people we know personally via email). Maybe @neva would be prepared to help me put together an interview format that made sense? Does that change your mind @alannakrause ?

Totally agree that proposal would be stronger/clearer if the path from decision----->action was specified

@strypey , want to add any clarification about what your thoughts are regarding implementation of your suggestion?

@benjaminknight @alannakrause
What you've suggested sounds fine Ben. Another approach could be to send out a one-off email to all users newer than 2 months, with a subject title like:
"Do you have opinions about email notifications from Loomio?"
In it would be a survey with no more than 3 questions, like:
"1) Are you happy to receive email notifications from Loomio that you haven't asked for, or do you only want email notifications if you ask for them?

2) Are you happy for the Loomio techs to change your email notification preferences for you when they roll out new options, or would you rather receive an email explaining them, and asking you to opt-in?

3) What kind/ frequency of email notifications would make Loomio a more useful tool for you and your group, without becoming overwhelming."

Related conversation (@neva talking about incentives for sending out the upcoming questionaire): http://www.loomio.org/discussions/1497

I'm currently getting flooded with notifications, and I'm starting to understand the appeal of the daily email ;) I like to receive an email if something needs an urgent response, like a proposal closing. For everything else, it occurs to me that the problem of handling general notifications is being shifted into people's email, where Loomio doesn't have to deal with it.

I strongly suggest reflecting on whether this is a good design strategy. What I think you need in your roadmap is plan to bring most of the notifications currently being farmed out to the email inbox back into the web UI.

Even with a good grasp of how to use folders and filters, email is a linear medium. The brilliance of Loomio (and social web in general) is precisely its ability to multi-thread. Although the group pages with their lists of active proposals, discussions, subgroups etc do this well. Unfortunately, the notification drop-down is very linear, and doesn't scale as a user gets involved in more groups, and groups get more users.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Perhaps having a notifications page, rather than drop-down? Perhaps dividing the notifications into more categories, and giving each of them a drop-down?

I agree with you @strypey - this rethinking of notifications is a big part of the upcoming UI overhaul.

The email summary page was a conscious step in the direction of what we imagine the dashboard could head in: per-group updates of recent activity.

Right now the notification dropdown is trying to tell you every piece of activity that is relevant to you, using a pretty rudimentary filter (if you have participated in a discussion, you will be notified about activity in it). I'd prefer to see an Activity feed, with 100% of activity in it, a Notifications feed, which has stuff that requires my attention (people reaching out to talk to me, e.g. vote on this proposal), and a Subscription feed for anything that I opt into. How those three are arranged is beyond me at this point :)

Dare I say it, that 3-way split is what Facebook has tried (and failed miserably) to achieve!

If we were to group comment notifications around discussions they would dry up a lot.
(there are usually 3 or more people generating notifications about the same discussion)

I've got a bit of list of under the hood improvements for notifications including this.

Heh, I agree with everything. Unsubscribe from group emails gets released today. What's the next best step after that? My thoughts are:

• Remove "new discussion" and "new motion" notifications from the UI drop-down? (I think the dashboard already does a pretty good job of highlighting this stuff)
• Group "new comment" notifications by discussion

Sorry Jon but I think that sounds reckless and hard to implement. We need comprehensive mockups before changing this stuff.

I think we need to work in terms of compiling a list of suggested changes and issues with the current design, then work on integrating that feedback into mockups

@richardd.bartlett @matthewbartlett is there a metric available for how many users are in more than one group?

@jamesmccann There will be shortly — a day or two at a guess. I'm interested in the same question.

@jamesmccann this is my feature branch for that: https://github.com/enspiral/loomio/tree/feature/user-stats

@matthewbartlett sweet! I think it will be an interesting statistic to measure.

I'm not sure what everyone else may know already but I would have thought there may be a potentially large portion of users in only one group (with a smallish number of subgroups)?

@jamesmccann Yes that's my hypothesis too. If true it'll probably have some impact on the dashboard design.

The current layout makes much more sense for multi-group users which is problematic insofar as all new users will only be in one group.

If you're in only one group the group page/dashboard page distinction must be baffling!

@jamesmccann done that now; it's part of https://github.com/enspiral/loomio/pull/445

Ah nice work - I've been meaning to make it along to a Friday meeting sometime, I'd be interested in the findings!