Feature request: delay moderation emails for first time posters or commenters until 24 hours have passed #6246

ebarry · 2019-09-05T14:50:55Z

The desired behavior.

The Moderators group convened last week to review the features available for moderators reviewing spam.

Working with @jywarren, we identified that people holding "moderator" roles on the website get a lot of notifications. The following two types of notifications generate the bulk of the notifications to moderators roles:

moderator roles: When a First Time Poster posts a note or a comment
moderator roles: When another moderator takes action on a note or comment

Analysis:

These type of notifications are completely redundant with the listing of spam on the dashboard.
responding to the request to approve or spam the new submission still requires clicking through to the website, so these emails do not streamline the activities of performing moderation duties.
For the past couple years, it has become reliable that there are daily submissions by new posters, making even a daily digest email notification redundant.

Based on that conversation, @bronwen9 and I have the following feature request:

Eliminate the email titled “[New Public Lab poster needs moderation]”
Eliminate the email titled "[New Public Lab commenter needs moderation]"

Additional context

Thank you. Does anyone have any other ideas or questions?

jywarren · 2019-09-05T16:20:09Z

Hi, this should be pretty straightforward to change; the code segments can be found here:

Notes

Initial needs moderation email:

plots2/app/models/node.rb

Line 221 in b6d5089

AdminMailer.notify_node_moderators(self).deliver_now

Did you also want the "this was marked as spam" email removed? That is here:

plots2/app/controllers/admin_controller.rb

Line 122 in b6d5089

AdminMailer.notify_moderators_of_spam(@node, current_user).deliver_later

And notification of approval of node is here:

plots2/app/controllers/admin_controller.rb

Line 194 in b6d5089

AdminMailer.notify_moderators_of_approval(@node, current_user).deliver_later

Comments

Initial comment moderation email is here:

plots2/app/models/comment.rb

Line 130 in b6d5089

AdminMailer.notify_comment_moderators(self).deliver_now

Notification of comment marked as spam:

plots2/app/controllers/admin_controller.rb

Line 146 in b6d5089

    
           AdminMailer.notify_moderators_of_comment_spam(@comment, current_user).deliver_later

Notification of comment approval:

plots2/app/controllers/admin_controller.rb

Line 170 in b6d5089

    
           AdminMailer.notify_moderators_of_comment_approval(@comment, current_user).deliver_later

The actual mailers can be found in this file; EVERYTHING EXCEPT the 2 highlighted functions would be removed; we still want to notify node and comment authors of approval:

plots2/app/mailers/admin_mailer.rb

Lines 32 to 48 in b6d5089

    
           def notify_author_of_approval(node, moderator) 
        
             subject = '[Public Lab] Your post was approved!' 
        
             @author = node.author 
        
             @moderator = moderator 
        
             @node = node 
        
             @footer = feature('email-footer') 
        
             mail(to: @author.email, subject: subject) 
        
           end 
        
           def notify_author_of_comment_approval(comment, moderator) 
        
             subject = '[Public Lab] Your comment was approved!' 
        
             @author_mail = comment.author.email 
        
             @moderator = moderator 
        
             @comment = comment 
        
             @footer = feature('email-footer') 
        
             mail(to: @author_mail, subject: subject) 
        
           end

Then, all mailer templates for moderators would be removed: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/tree/master/app/views/admin_mailer

And finally, this will break a lot of tests which protect the mailer functions, so those will need to be removed. There are quite a few; i'll list some here but we'll be able to see them fail and can remove them afterwards:

plots2/test/functional/comment_controller_test.rb

Lines 280 to 284 in b6d5089

    
           test 'should send mail to moderator if comment has status 4' do 
        
             UserSession.create(users(:moderator)) 
        
             post :create, params: { id: nodes(:one).nid, body: 'example', status: 4 }, xhr: true 
        
             assert ActionMailer::Base.deliveries.collect(&:to).include?([users(:moderator).email]) 
        
           end

Actually i think all the others can be found here, so the entire file could be removed:

https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/test/unit/admin_mailer_test.rb

This is a lot of code; we should probably do it all in a single PR and carefully check it.

ebarry · 2019-09-05T16:44:08Z

Wow thank you!!!! Yes, thanks for pointing out the "Notification of comment marked as spam" and "Notification of post marked as spam" emails -- they should also be discontinued. Sorry for breaking tests and making extra work on that!

bronwen9 · 2019-09-05T16:50:11Z

Yay! Thanks! Agree, until we think of a better system, I think an end to all email (except for alerts to the google group) is best.

…

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 12:44 PM Liz Barry ***@***.***> wrote: Wow thank you!!!! Yes, thanks for pointing out the "Notification of comment marked as spam" and "Notification of post marked as spam" emails -- they should also be discontinued. Sorry for breaking tests and making extra work on that! — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#6246?email_source=notifications&email_token=AB7SDRITATKEJYYBH2GEA3TQIEZNZA5CNFSM4IT62HS2YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOD57ZQYQ#issuecomment-528455778>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB7SDRMWRH7NOEDMJ3HQNCLQIEZNZANCNFSM4IT62HSQ> .

jywarren · 2019-09-05T21:30:21Z

Sorry, you're not breaking the tests! was typing a lot quickly... i just meant that we've protected these features with tests, so removing the features will cause the tests to report failures, so we need to remove the tests too. Just trying to be thorough and warn anyone attempting this in advance, thanks!

grvsachdeva · 2019-09-05T21:36:03Z

I believe we should only remove the mailer calls and not the mailer as we may need them in future. Also, we should try to make all emails async and send them via sidekiq as that'll free up main thread. What do you think @jywarren?

jywarren · 2019-09-06T16:53:18Z

I think this depends on whether we see this as a permanent change, and if there is no possible case for moderation emails for any use. Things to consider to make this decision permanent would be: * could such emails be used as part of integration with another system, like IFTTT or anything? * could such emails be useful for someone else running the PL codebase for another community, and do we want to preserve such capability? * could such emails be useful for authors to be notified of spam comments on their posts so they can moderate them themselves, or * could such emails be useful for topic groups to do their own moderation, rather than having a central moderators group? If we have a reasonable expectation of any of these, we could simply "turn off" both the emails and the tests, rather than delete them, or we could base their sending on a configuration file which is enabled in testing, but off in our production setup. Then the system could be turned on again, or adapted for a different purpose, but wouldn't have to be rebuilt.

…

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 5:36 PM Gaurav Sachdeva ***@***.***> wrote: I believe we should only remove the mailer calls and not the mailer as we may need them in future. Also, we should try to make all emails async and send them via sidekiq as that'll free up main thread. What do you think @jywarren <https://github.com/jywarren>? — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#6246?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAAF6J7PFKCEY6QRT7HBPZ3QIF3UJA5CNFSM4IT62HS2YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOD6A4OPQ#issuecomment-528598846>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAF6JYMK2BTOUPCBADRMULQIF3UJANCNFSM4IT62HSQ> .

grvsachdeva · 2019-09-07T20:36:43Z

could such emails be used as part of integration with another system,
like IFTTT or anything?

Don't know.

could such emails be useful for someone else running the PL codebase for
another community, and do we want to preserve such capability?

Yes, they can be useful.

could such emails be useful for authors to be notified of spam comments
on their posts so they can moderate them themselves, or

yes, we can extend this privilege to post author and create a mailer

could such emails be useful for topic groups to do their own moderation,
rather than having a central moderators group?
yes.

Another idea is to setup a cron job which will send a mail about the # of new posts pending for moderation as a reminder to moderators group.

ebarry · 2019-09-09T13:09:30Z

This sounds like several good reasons to "turn off" the mailer instead of deleting it. Cool! I especially like the idea that, in the future, topic groups may do their own moderation. I could see that people would be eager to help curate the areas they care about.

Does this also mean that we should "turn off" the tests instead of deleting them?

ebarry · 2019-09-09T17:31:39Z

@bronwen9 proposes, and I support, to send a notification email if a post or comment has been waiting in the queue for 24 hours.

jywarren · 2019-09-09T20:57:53Z

2 thoughts to add - first, "if it's been waiting for 24 hours" we could do with a DelayedJob - with SendModeratorEmailJob.set(wait: 1.day).perform_later(node) https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_job_basics.html#enqueue-the-job Second, yes, we should turn off the tests. But - if we want to, let's identify which of these systems we can adapt into a "24 hour delayed message" (with a conditional that it not be sent if some condition is fulfilled: that it's been approved) and make a checklist of what could be adapted instead of turned off!

ebarry · 2019-09-12T20:48:48Z

Recapping the revised plan:

email notifications on 24 hour delay, on a conditional that email not be sent if content has been approved
confirmations off

jywarren · 2019-09-12T21:22:24Z

Thanks @ebarry, just adding detail here:

change initial moderator email notifications for comments and nodes to send after a 24 hour delay (using DelayedJob as described above), on the condition that the content has not yet been approved or spammed
turn confirmations (has been approved and has been spammed) and their corresponding tests off, but don't yet delete them

👍

jywarren · 2019-09-12T21:22:43Z

Those two tasks can be done as two separate PRs! And in theory, we could do them separately for comments and nodes, so potentially 4 PRs.

jywarren · 2019-09-12T21:33:18Z

Actually, it looks like mailers are already Jobs, in Rails, so we can do:

AdminMailer.notify_node_moderators(node).deliver_later!(wait_until: 24.hours.from_now)

And, we could wrap this line in the conditional:

plots2/app/mailers/admin_mailer.rb

Lines 12 to 16 in dc166a0

    
           mail( 
        
             to: "moderators@#{ActionMailer::Base.default_url_options[:host]}", 
        
             bcc: moderators, 
        
             subject: subject 
        
           )

So, like:

if node.status == 4 # only if it remains unmoderated
  mail(
      to: "moderators@#{ActionMailer::Base.default_url_options[:host]}",
      bcc: moderators,
      subject: subject
    )
end

jywarren · 2019-10-07T15:36:18Z

Initial implementation here: #6409, but will take some test corrections and debugging to get right, and also will require some manual testing in production.

ebarry · 2019-10-31T14:32:05Z

Would this also resolve this earlier issue about allowing moderators to control their own email settings where their other email settings are controlled? #4543

jywarren · 2019-10-31T19:10:43Z

No, this does not affect that issue, thanks!

jywarren · 2020-01-10T18:35:10Z

Just noting that we turned off initial, confirm (spam and not-spam) for nodes, and spam/not-spam for comments, but this #6409 did NOT turn off initial notifications for comments. Will do this next.

jywarren · 2020-01-10T18:36:02Z

plots2/test/functional/admin_controller_test.rb

Lines 550 to 566 in 08ab5c0

    
           test 'should send email to comment author when it is approved (first time commenter)' do 
        
             user = users(:admin) 
        
             UserSession.create(user) 
        
             comment = comments(:comment_status_4) 
        
             node = comment.node 
        
             post :publish_comment, params: { id: comment.id } 
        
             email = AdminMailer.notify_author_of_comment_approval(comment, user) 
        
             assert_emails 1 do 
        
                 email.deliver_now 
        
             end 
        
             assert email.body.include?("Hi! Your comment was approved by <a href='https://#{request_host}/profile/#{user.username}'>#{user.username}</a> (a <a href='https://#{request_host}/wiki/moderation'>community moderator</a>) and is now visible in the <a href='https://#{request_host}/dashboard'>Public Lab research feed</a>. Thanks for contributing to open research!") 
        
             comment = assigns(:comment) 
        
             assert_equal 1, comment.status 
        
             assert_redirected_to node.path 
        
           end

Should comment notifications also be held 24 hours?

ebarry added the feature explains that the issue is to add a new feature label Sep 5, 2019

ebarry added this to the Spam! milestone Sep 5, 2019

jywarren added the help wanted requires help by anyone willing to contribute label Sep 5, 2019

ebarry changed the title ~~Feature request: eliminate moderation emails for first time posters or commenters~~ Feature request: delay moderation emails for first time posters or commenters until 24 hours have passed Sep 9, 2019

jywarren mentioned this issue Sep 12, 2019

Display of an SVG at various places to show if user is banned or active #3338

Closed

jywarren added the break-me-up break up for cleaner code separation, discrete tests, and, easier and iterative collaboration label Sep 12, 2019

jywarren mentioned this issue Oct 7, 2019

Delay moderator notifications 24h, remove all confirmation emails, remove spam from dashboard #6409

Merged

jywarren mentioned this issue Jan 7, 2020

Reconcile moderation email notifications with the list at /spam #7142

Closed

jywarren closed this as completed in #6409 Jan 7, 2020

jywarren reopened this Jan 10, 2020

jywarren mentioned this issue Jan 10, 2020

Apply 24 hold to initial comment moderation emails #7187

Merged

jywarren closed this as completed in #7187 Jan 22, 2020

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Feature request: delay moderation emails for first time posters or commenters until 24 hours have passed #6246

Feature request: delay moderation emails for first time posters or commenters until 24 hours have passed #6246

ebarry commented Sep 5, 2019

jywarren commented Sep 5, 2019

ebarry commented Sep 5, 2019

bronwen9 commented Sep 5, 2019 via email

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Feature request: delay moderation emails for first time posters or commenters until 24 hours have passed #6246

Feature request: delay moderation emails for first time posters or commenters until 24 hours have passed #6246

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ebarry commented Sep 5, 2019

jywarren commented Sep 5, 2019

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