Membership deactivation emails are misleading

Bug #175277 reported by William Grant
10
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Launchpad membership deactivation emails are somewhat confusing.

 Subject: ubuntu-dev deactivated by mdz

Erm? Why has the Ubuntu Development Team been deactivated? That sounds a bit suspicious.

 From: REVU team

Erm? What? Didn't mdz do it, not the REVU team?

/me looks at the body.

Ah, that makes a bit more sense. mdz deactivated ubuntu-dev from revu. But where?

/me looks harder, and notices the from address is `REVU team <email address hidden>'

That clarified it, though it took far too much work to get there.

Summary:
The emails need a better subject and rationale so that is clear from which team a team left and who did it.

Revision history for this message
Guilherme Salgado (salgado) wrote :

The idea of using the team's name in the 'From' header was to make it possible to have all necessary information about the change visible in an email client without the user /having to/ actually read the message body. Since we don't expect our users to have super-wide resolutions we can't place all that information in the subject as that'd cause it to be trimmed by most email clients, so we decided to use the 'From' header to convey information (the team in question) as well.

Maybe you can suggest a few changes for us to make it easier to parse?

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

I think that in any message from Launchpad, the "From" header should represent either Launchpad itself, or the person who performed an action. So in this case, the From header wouldn't be "REVU team", but it might be "Matt Zimmerman". If it was, the Subject could be "Ubuntu Development Team is no longer active in REVU team".

Revision history for this message
Guilherme Salgado (salgado) wrote : Re: [Bug 175277] Re: Membership deactivation emails are misleading

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 02:19:59PM -0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> I think that in any message from Launchpad, the "From" header should
> represent either Launchpad itself, or the person who performed an
> action. So in this case, the From header wouldn't be "REVU team", but it
> might be "Matt Zimmerman". If it was, the Subject could be "Ubuntu
> Development Team is no longer active in REVU team".

That sounds good to me, but I think we should keep the existing subjects,
only adding the team on which the change was performed. These subjects are
small because we want to use the From:/Subject: headers to convey the most
interesting bits of information without having them too long as that'd cause
mailers in most standard screen resolutions to cut some parts of the
subject. IIRC, the rationale for that is that most team administrators are
very busy and must be able to see at a glance what the change is about
--without having to read the whole email.

Curtis Hovey (sinzui)
affects: launchpad-foundations → launchpad-registry
Changed in launchpad-registry:
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Triaged
Curtis Hovey (sinzui)
tags: added: email teams
Curtis Hovey (sinzui)
description: updated
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