By bbeyer on
We really need a way to subscribe to comments on issues for modules without having to leave a useless comment containing "subscribe." It really clutters up the conversation. There are plenty of modules out there that could be used for this and I believe I have seen others discussing this before. For example, at http://drupal.org/node/560324 over half the comments are people just subscribing. So what is the best place to post feedback for the drupal.org website?
Comments
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You don't really think this hasn't been mentioned already do ya? lol... see #34496: [meta] Add Flag module to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe without posting a comment for the long and sordid history.
Also see http://3281d.com/2009/03/27/death-to-subscribe-comments for some additional info.
There is already subscribe
There is already subscribe function to the modules' issues without posting any comments on: http://drupal.org/project/issues/subscribe-mail/project-name. For example, if you want to subscribe to the discussions of the issues related to Views module, you go to http://drupal.org/project/issues/subscribe-mail/views, select between None, Own issues, All issues and proceed. Those who subscribe to issues by commenting on their pages either don't know about this feature or they just feel more comfortable and quicker to just post a comment. Which is completely ok, too. Why not?
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Because once you've participated in any more than a couple of active issues, it gets really old really fast to see an issue bumped up in your tracker 20 times a day only to take a look and see "+1 subscribe". Especially when it's an issue with over 300 comments-- not only is the paging wonky, but you're now irritating hundreds of people at one time for no good reason.
Right. Those irritated should
Right. Those irritated should use above mentioned method. For others, comments could contain not only "subscribe" word, but any other short words or expressions, which would be quite legit for the poster him/herself, but don't represent much interest to the general course of any particular discussion. So it is not just possible to make everybody post only meaningful and useful messages.
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Those 'irritated' who are actually participating in the issue (as opposed to just subscribing but contributing nothing) don't have a choice. "Subscribing" to an issue with hundreds of participants without actually contributing anything is bad form-- at least until the problem is fixed.
I see your point and also
I see your point and also would prefer rather clean and meaningful course of discussions. However, as I said above it is just not possible to make everyone to behave as you would like them to behave. And it is not possible to somehow programmatically sort apart "contributing" messages from those which are not really useful. Drupal forums and project issues discussions are for everybody, including newbies. In order to have clean and professional pages of discussions you have to somehow segregate more used to Drupal-way experience users from those who are [yet] not. And I really don't see any way of achieving that.