Multiple notifications sent?

[plehegar]

I modified the March 31 instance: https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/9718517d-0e08-4377-bb7c-07332948233b/20210331T110000 (from Confirmed -> Tentative)

for "this and future occurrence".

And it sent 2 notifications instead of one. One of the 2 was about the March 17 instance: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-pointer-events/2021JanMar/0109.html

[anssiko]

I created a number of meetings and was surprised to see the invites were automatically sent to the group's list without asking my permission. This resulted in a flood of ~10 mails before I noticed, some of which were "Event Changed" mails.

My suggestion would be to display a prompt that tells the user an action will result in an email being sent to the list with an attached meeting invite.

[jnurthen]

@anssiko I just filed #24

[jean-gui]

Sending two notifications is the expected behavior. When you "Edit this and future occurrences", you effectively create a new recurring event and end the recurrence of the original one on that date. AFAICT this has to be done this way because calendar clients don't support parts of the ical spec that would make this smoother. When you "edit this and future", Google Agenda and other clients perform the same split and also send multiple notifications.

That's unfortunate, but if we want invitees to be able to update their calendars accurately I don't think there's a better solution.

[plehegar]

(waiting on proposal in #24 to get implemented)

[r12a]

We set up a calendar for i18n WG meetings this week, and had complaints because there was a flood of messages. I sent initial notifications on Wednesday for the meeting which was to be held on Thursday. Attendees received 2 copies - one direct to them (presumably for the ICS file), and one via the public-i18n-core list (with no joining info, presumably for archival). Not great, but manageable.

Then on Thursday, shortly before the meeting, i updated the agenda with new items and naively clicked on the 'Update' button so that people would be notified that the agenda had changed. Attendees received 4 notifications. Two notifications of the update, and two new invitations. This is really too much.

Can we not automatically send another invitation when only the agenda has been changed and the Update button is pressed – or at least ask the person making the change what they want to do. Or maybe we can sent a single email that says at the top somewhere that the agenda was changed.

Btw, can we arrange for copies of notifications to be sent to the member list rather than public-i18n-core? That's where we always sent agendas in the past. Perhaps allow the chair/staff to indicate which list they want notifications to go to?

In fact, if the invitation is sent to the member list, it would mean that there's no need to hide the joining instructions. This would presumably allow the system to reduce the number of emails received by the attendee to just one, by removing individual copies for those people already on the db-backed WG member list. (Invitees not on that db-backed list would of course need to be sent individual emails.)

[xfq]

@r12a It looks like there is a config in https://www.w3.org/users/myprofile/calendar/preferences to fix this.

It can be found in the My Calendar page (by clicking Preferences in the upper right corner).

[r12a]

So that page contains the following:

Notifications

When Group meetings are created or updated, the editor can choose to send email notifications to all participants in the groups. If you do not wish to receive those emails, please uncheck the box below. [checkbox] Receive email notifications of events to which my groups are invited

Note: you will still receive notifications if you are specifically invited to a meeting.

My guess as to what this means is that: a. all group participants need to deselect this checkbox b. the staff/chair needs to remove "Internationalization Working Group" from the Groups field in the Participants tab b. anyone updating the agenda should then specifically invite the group (presumably, by specifying the email address for the group mailing list in "Additional individual attendees" on the same page) so that they receive the update.

Does anyone know if that's right?

[plehegar]

One receives notifications because:

1. the checkbox on their profile page is checked in.
2. they are subscribed the group list and the author of the event elected to send a notification to the list
3. they are specifically invited by name to the meeting.

[matatk]

I'm not sure if this is exactly the same issue, but I've noticed this happen a few times (most recently with yesterday's WAICC call chaired by @iadawn and @shawna-slh...

• A meeting (single instance) gets cancelled.
• A notification goes out about the cancellation.
• Another notification goes out immediately afterwards, confirming a previous meeting.

In the case of yesterday's WAICC, the 4th of September call was cancelled, and then I immediately got another notification about the August the 28th call going ahead (which has, of course, already passed). Both notification emails reached my inbox in the same minute (with the cancellation one first).

[plehegar]

@matatk , it seems to me that the explanation provided earlier in the thread still stand...