[ckan-dev] Notifications that you've been added to a group/org

Tue Sep 17 14:33:59 UTC 2013

> The use-case we're trying to solve is when you have an organization owner
> that's adding people to her organization, so they can add (or review)
> datasets. These users are waiting for this to be able to work. It would be
> good to notify them, so they don't have to keep logging in CKAN to realise
> they have access.
> 
> I created an issue and committed a patch that creates a new ActivityStream
> entry whenever the user is added to a group/org (
> https://github.com/okfn/ckan/issues/1242). With that, she will receive a
> notification in the usual "You have new activity" email. But this might not
> be enough.
> 
> Maybe we need a separate notification e-mail.

I think you probably want to send separate "You've been added to
organization Foo" emails. Also, you'll probably want to make sure these
user added to organization activities don't trigger the usual "You have
new activity" notification emails, so the user doesn't get two emails.

> But, before that, we have to analyze when the notifications at large
> are sent, so we don't risk flooding the users.

For a "You've been added to organization Foo" email, you probably want
to send the email notification straight away as soon as the user gets
added to the org. But something like sending an email should probably be
done synchronously, not asynchronously. The way the current "You have
new activity" emails work is that the sysadmin sets up a cron job (eg.
hourly, daily or weekly) to send the emails, but that wouldn't be ideal
for these new "You've been added to organization Foo".

I don't think there is currently a recommended way of doing asynchronous
actions in CKAN (that's better than cron), so this may be a problem you
need to solve.

>Also, how can the user deactivate them? Right now, I think the
>notifications can only be deactivated system-wide, right?

Wrong. Currently, email notifications need to be turned on both
system-wide (by the sysadmin) and per-user (by the user editing their
preferences). See:

http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/email-notifications.html

If either the user or the sysadmin turns email notifications off, then
no emails will be sent to the user.

I think you do probably want more granularity though, you probably want
to allow the user to turn off the "You have new activity" emails but
leave on the more important "You've been added to an organization" ones,
for example.

Another question about this new email notifications feature is whether
we want the "You've been added to an organization" notifications to be
shown separately from the "You have new activity" emails in the web user
interface. If so, we'll need some UI design.