Replace Messaging/Notification modules

Groups.drupal.org also uses messaging and notifications and will want to be upgraded to D7 at approximately the same time. It will also need something else, or working messaging and notifications.

Moving to new queue.

Note that currently Commerce Kickstart, Acquia Commons, Open Atrium 2.0 and OpenScholar are using Message for activity/notifications.
It's integration with Advanced-Queue module allows it to send notifications in a scalable maner.

I'm wondering if we can speed this up? For example, if the messaging and notification modules work direct now on Drupal 7, make them be used for now. I'm not sure they are direct ports of the Drupal 6 versions. If not, then it would be great to see how widespread messaging/notification setups are. What if we drop in favor of RSS feeds, etc. in the short term. Are we cutting the lifeblood or cutting extra complexity only? Since there does not seem to be an outpouring of interest to make this work from the community at large, trying to be pragmatic balancing the upgrade to happen sooner, so we can make localize.drupal.org work for Drupal 8 features too (vs. building that all out for Drupal 6) sooner than later. Drupal 8 is expected to have tagged releases in about 4 months.

We have too many emails already. I'm all for an RSS feed or notification dashboard like http://drupal.org/user/UID/track

But if we do go this route, I think it'd be better to consider using the Message module rather than Messaging framework and Notification modules since the overhead is known to be a problem anyway.

All right, well, to understand my own question, I went to http://localize.drupal.org/admin/messaging/subscriptions and the stats are: Subscriptions by send method: Drupal mail: 27490 (no other send method). These are the user vs. signup queue signups. Then there are 17639 notifications *PENDING*, and running the notifications queue would not make any of them delivered either. While http://localize.drupal.org/admin/messaging/notifications says they are processed on cron, this could even indicate they are not even being sent, and given nobody complained, it might not actually being in use. More investigation would be great as to what are these items in the queue. Most of them had no label, so it could be old broken data too, and maybe the ongoing notifications work fine. Anybody signed up and receiving notifications? (I'm not signed up).

Going with Message seems to be the preferred option for D7.

That said, I think probably investigating whether the 'Automatically enable notifications for any groups that I join.' should be enabled by default or not for l.d.o because I was unaware that I was auto-subscribed to all my groups and rather than going in and deleting those subscriptions, I just regularly deleted the e-mails because they were not very useful for me at all. Joining a group to contribute translations seems different than "I want to be updated on everything being done in this translation group."

Porting OG Classic would be an hour or two of work, considering that writing it took only a day or two. I;d be happy to do it for l.d.o if you will use it.

Alternatively, Commons 3.0 successfully launched with Message module where it formerly used Notifications as well. Perhaps we can copy its implementation.

> 'Automatically enable notifications for any groups that I join.'

If we are going to use Message-subscribe, then the subscription is done via the Flag module. Further more, you are able to "follow" a group, to see it in the activity stream, but opt out from receiving emails.

Yeah, well, so it would be great to brainstorm about new features, but doing new features on Drupal 6 is pointless :) So the question is if those subscriptions are valuable and should be kept/upgraded/migrated, or we consider those not actually useful as-is and then dropping the feature for some time to speed up the Drupal 7 upgrade (especially if it is not going to be a subscription like system, so there would be no space to migrate the notifications to).

I took a quick look at it does seem like there is only group based nontifications, there are no subscriptions for threads, authors or content types. Only "general posts in groups" type of notification setup. So given what @DaveReid pointed out "Automatically enable notifications for any groups that I join." is turned on by default.

It would have been great if alippai would have delivered on that GSoC, but he did not and dropped out in the middle instead way back in 2011. :/

Since Message notify/ Message subscribe are built on top of Message, it's possible to start with an activity stream (which seems to acceptable by all), and only later on add notifications.

Posted this to get some feedback as to whether we are ensuring a disaster if we skip updating notifications for now. http://localize.drupal.org/node/5583

Hi,

In the French translation team, we encourage people to inform us of their contribution on the board so we can follow activity and validate translations using the notifications, but a RSS / activity wall would be totally ok for me, as long as I have a way to follow the activity of the group quickly.
To be fair, it would only be a minor nuisance for me if there was no such system during some time, I'll just have to use bookmarks more intensively, and take the time to follow the activity.
I agree it's only useful for administrators / heavy contributors of the group, and not for the general user.

The Norwegian translation team will survive without notifications for a period.

Hi,
as a memeber of both French and (recently) Arabic Teams, i always found theses notifications useful. Also communication is mostly done by publishing a node on the board and people get notified.
If it is needed to swith off temporary this feature, i think we can survive with an rss feed too.
Thanks

I didn't even notice the notification exist; and I never got any.

Ok, we are going to postpone this part of the upgrade and could very well launch with a D7 site that does not have the email notifications feature.

Updated issue summary.

Will this feature come back/be implemented? What's the final decision?