I just made the discovery that emails to groups create nodes with no titles, which then also create messed up url aliases.

Comments

kyle_mathews’s picture

kyle_mathews commented

Agree this is a bug. What would you suggest be the default title if someone doesn't include a subject in their email?

tobias’s picture

tobias commented

Hi Kyle,

I'd either take the first few words of the body content (like comments without titles) or reject the message with a "please add a subject line" header. I'd probably prefer the latter personally, since I think titles are pretty important.

This is a fairly severe bug - today I saw that a follow-up email to the same subject-less thread started a new node rather than add a comment. Weird.

Cheers,

Tobias

kyle_mathews’s picture

kyle_mathews commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Cool, emails w/o subjects are now rejected with a polite error message:
http://github.com/KyleAMathews/og_mailinglist/commit/246f58c03be7db9ab13...

tobias’s picture

tobias commented

Great! I tested this and it works for me. Thanks for the fix!

lp’s picture

lp commented

I don't have any objection to this per se, but it seems to represent a tiny slice of a UX paradigm. As is, OGM is basically valuing correct, meaningful structure over a shift in the standard interaction with the list.

Valuing standard interaction, disregarding semantic content of title = insert a token, "(no subject)", etc.
Valuing standard interaction, accept lowest level of title value = use first few words of the body content
Disregarding standard interaction, valuing semantic titles = error message

kyle_mathews’s picture

kyle_mathews commented

Hmmm... yeah, I see your point LP... not really sure I have a strong opinion on this really. I've never seen it happen on the og_mailinglists I run so I've never thought about it before.

I'm kind of leaning now though toward just inserting "(no subject)" for the title. The only people who are likely to leave off a title are noobs and throwing back an error message is somewhat unfriendly. Inserting (no subject) is a more passive/gentle way of telling them they should of had a title.

I don't like the insert first few words of body as that'd almost always produce a nonsense title.

tobias’s picture

tobias commented

I am ambivalent about this too - though I also think that it's fine the way it is now, unless there's some general principle you're talking about that I'm not familiar with.

Thinking about my use case, I personally can only imagine one scenario where the current setup would be really annoying - if I were sitting in a cybercafe in Africa and shooting off a quick post before going offline. I would be annoyed to come back the next time I am able to get online to an error message instead of the replies from other people that I am hoping for.

Otherwise I think the error is plenty gentle and I'd appreciate the warning so that I can craft a proper subject line for my post. Of course I can always go back and fix the subject line, but on Kabissa users can't edit the URL Alias and it would no not-so-great if it were http://someserver.com/discussion/no-subject-234 :)

Cheers,

Tobias

kyle_mathews’s picture

kyle_mathews commented

I switched the behavior so it sets the title as (no subject) as I felt that was somewhat better. http://github.com/KyleAMathews/og_mailinglist/commit/1967e3b9203cef4a702...

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.