Email alerts of broken scrapers are a fantastic way to ensure that scrapers are maintainable. However, in the case of planningalerts we have a lot of scrapers and many of them (around 30 or 40) can be broken at any one time. It just isn't helpful to get an email alert one day that says have 38 broken scrapers and the next day get a message saying you have 39 broken scrapers. Is it one new broken scraper? Which one?
The fact that the subject line is roughly the same every day and the email alerts come every day means that in reality I completely ignore them. I suspect I'm not unusual in this in which case the current design of the email alerts is completely broken because it just doesn't serve its purpose.
A possible solution:
Add an "acknowledge" action next to every broken scraper in an email alert. When you acknowledge a broken scraper you're saying I've recorded that it's broken somewhere sensible and I don't want to get alerted about it (until it's fixed and then breaks again).
This would allow the user to truly see new interesting things.
Anyone can subscribe to get email alerts from any scraper so the acknowledge action needs to be a personal one. Everyone will have to do it for themselves.
The problem:
Email alerts of broken scrapers are a fantastic way to ensure that scrapers are maintainable. However, in the case of planningalerts we have a lot of scrapers and many of them (around 30 or 40) can be broken at any one time. It just isn't helpful to get an email alert one day that says have 38 broken scrapers and the next day get a message saying you have 39 broken scrapers. Is it one new broken scraper? Which one?
The fact that the subject line is roughly the same every day and the email alerts come every day means that in reality I completely ignore them. I suspect I'm not unusual in this in which case the current design of the email alerts is completely broken because it just doesn't serve its purpose.
A possible solution: Add an "acknowledge" action next to every broken scraper in an email alert. When you acknowledge a broken scraper you're saying I've recorded that it's broken somewhere sensible and I don't want to get alerted about it (until it's fixed and then breaks again).
This would allow the user to truly see new interesting things.
Anyone can subscribe to get email alerts from any scraper so the acknowledge action needs to be a personal one. Everyone will have to do it for themselves.