"New Community Messages" Dialog for unresponsive mappers

[cmoffroad]

Problem

Background

A lot of communication issues arise because users aren’t responsive to community messages.

Most of the time, senders think the recipients are purposely ignoring them, but as we’ve discussed here, some mappers may not even be getting the email notifications or they’re just not good with managing emails.

From what I’ve seen, many of these users are beginners who rely on iD as their main editor.

Implementing this feature would ensure that users who are currently uninformed become aware of the messages, and it would provide us with a clear indication if a user is intentionally ignoring them.

Solution

To enhance user experience, I suggest to introduce website functionality that utilizes a modal to notify users about the following:

• Unread messages
• Unreplied changeset comments

This modal should be displayed when users navigate to the "/edit" page, provided there are any pending messages.

The community responded positively to this proposal: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/suspicious-user-activity-potential-fictional-mapping-vandalism/100336/12

Description

No response

Screenshots

No response

[tomhughes]

Our "community" has over 10 million users and that thread has, if I'm reading right, a single reply that appears to support the idea so I think saying the community reacted positively may be overstating things a little.

Given you appear to be proposing a modal (something that will be very controversial) for the whole web site I'm not really sure what iD has to do with this.

I think the primary concern about a modal dialog like this is that you're looking at it from the point of view of a new user who occasionally gets one or two messages - if we consider it from the point of a very active mapper who probably always has new messages arriving then the result would be this modal popping up and having to be dismissed every time they visit the site which I'm guessing might not be very popular.

[cmoffroad]

Our "community" has over 10 million users and that thread has, if I'm reading right, a single reply that appears to support the idea so I think saying the community reacted positively may be overstating things a little.

I was referring to the dozen regulars at https://community.openstreetmap.org/ who actively engage in discussions on various global topics, but let's move on from that point ;)

Given you appear to be proposing a modal (something that will be very controversial) for the whole web site I'm not really sure what iD has to do with this.

I understand your point about moving the issue to iD, but please note that when I raised the same concern regarding the "Report User" topic, I was informed that it is specific to the "openstreetmap-website" codebase. Therefore, I assumed that any code related to changeset comments or unread messages would also need to be addressed at the website level. Correct me if I'm mistaken.

I think the primary concern about a modal dialog like this is that you're looking at it from the point of view of a new user who occasionally gets one or two messages - if we consider it from the point of a very active mapper who probably always has new messages arriving then the result would be this modal popping up and having to be dismissed every time they visit the site which I'm guessing might not be very popular.

I totally agree with your point, and it would be great to hear more ideas from the community. We can explore different UX solutions, like adding options such as "Dismiss for 24 hours" or "Dismiss for 1 week" to provide more flexibility.

Another option could be including a user profile setting to hide the dialogs by default. This way, new users would still see the dialog, but experienced users can choose their preferred setup.

Let's keep the discussion going and see what other suggestions we can come up with!

[tomhughes]

Incidentally we already have #4070 looking at ways of making message notifications more obvious

That's about user-user messages but there's no reason we couldn't display a similar indicator for changeset comments though we would first have to agree what changeset comments exactly should be notified - is it just comments on your own changesets? on any changeset you're subscribed to?

We would also have to decide what it means to "read" a changeset comment - do you just have to load the changeset view after that comment is added? or actually scroll down enough to see it? Once we had done that we would have to add a table to record which users had seen which comments as that is not something we record at the moment.

[gravitystorm]

I'd rather we designed a proper notifications system first, and then migrated existing events to use it. This would allow users to choose how they want notifications for different things.

At the moment all notifications are by email, there's nowhere to control which notifications you receive, there's nowhere to see a list of notifications that you have been sent, there's no way to control how you would like notifications delivered, and developers writing code for different events have to reimplement notifications each time. I don't think adding more types of notification, or adding more complexity to existing notifications, is worthwhile until proper foundations are in place.