this would enable the recipient of the subscrition email to use the hierarchical view
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MailNews:Message_Threading#Details

Comments

salvis’s picture

salvis
he/his
commented

How exactly would we do that? What is a thread? a post and its comments?

Nigristriata’s picture

Nigristriata commented

Sorry, I don't know the details how to use references in email messages. But as a usual user I'm aware of the great possibility to switch over to a hierarchical view of the email messages, as shown in this image: http://www.chris-wong.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Capture2.JPG

Why is this feature very interesting for notification emails too?
My drupal site sends the complete content of new postings inside the notification email. The users don't have to visit the website when receiving a notification, they can read the content directly in the email. This enables the users to have a local archive of the website content in their email program. And if they are travelling without having internet access, they can go through the notification emails and as such have access to the website content for doing some research.

Usually the notification emails are ordered by date or if selected by subject. Ordering by subject is one possibility to arrange them together - but a hierarchical view would be great!

salvis’s picture

salvis
he/his
commented
Version: 7.x-1.0-beta3 » 7.x-1.x-dev

That is an interesting idea.

I see one problem, however: currently, we merge multiple comments in the same thread into one notification.

Nigristriata’s picture

Nigristriata commented

That's ok, no need to change this behaviour. It must not be perfectly hierarchical.

salvis’s picture

salvis
he/his
commented

Thanks for the gentle reminder about this open issue.

As mentioned above, if we have two comments in the same notification, we have two problems:

1. They may not have the same parent, so we have a conflict about which parent to attach to.

2. When there is another comment later, it may need to be attached to either of the two prior comments, but since they are in the same notification, they have only one ID (the ID of the first comment), and at the time when we put together the second notification, we cannot even know that the former two comments have been sent together. We cannot even store this information in a reasonable way, because it may be different for different users. So, either we'd attach all comments to the root node, or we'd try to attach to the parent comment, at the risk of not finding that ID and having the conversation fall apart.

The consequence is that for technical reasons, this would be far from perfect, which means we'd get a continuous stream of bug reports. We (maintainers) would be shooting ourselves in the foot by releasing such functionality.

If we'd accept the trade-off that comments won't be merged, this could be done, but this means we'd need to have another configuration option. We already have too many options, and even though this has been in the public for 10 months now, no one besides you has shown interest in this functionality...

Still, if we pursue this a little further: Would this be a site-specific or a user-specific option? To make it work well, we'd have to pick up the comment author and title and put them into the email subject. This means our templates would become more complicated — we'd have to differentiate more between node notifications and comment notifications. If it were a user-specific option, we'd have to differentiate even more. This is hard to justify for a feature with little interest...