24 June 2014, 20:00

Hi,

when working on the new message plugin to multiple recipients, I decided not to delete the complete messages of a user or to a user, when that user is deleted. The reason is that this user could be only one of several receivers of the message so the other participants might continue the conversation. But this deleted user now shows up with the ....deleted.123... username which looks a bit weird. 

I could, instead, remove the user from the recipient list of all messages that were sent to him and delete all messages where no recipient is left, as well as all messages that the user had sent himself. 

On the other hand, users might not want to loose messages, only because the sender was deleted. So instead I could change the display name of the deleted user. 

What do you think? 

26 June 2014, 21:23

Hello Tobias,

Good questions. If we keep all messages then that may be a whole lot to keep. With normal users that may be fine, but what if someone spams people? In the age of growing disks, people may not delete any of their messages in Mahara. I know I'm bad at it because I get them as notifications and therefore ignore the inbox which grows and grows.

It says that read notifications will be deleted after 60 days, but that doesn't seem to happen (filed a bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1334576). If that worked, we wouldn't have to worry so much. But going forward, does your enhancement delete messages automatically after a certain time?

Internally, I think we will need to keep the actual number of the deleted user. However, it doesn't have to be displayed to users on the front end that way. That could just be "Deleted User".

As for messages, are you just talking about messages by other users or also system messages, e.g. one generated for a page that the deleted user had made available to somebody else?

Cheers

Kristina

27 June 2014, 2:29

Hi Kristina,

I understand your concern about questions not being deleted automatically. I saw the bug and I think I remember having read that hint before, wondering when and where that would happen. On the other side, advancing with the messages, maybe there sometimes are messages a user wants to keep. I remember my first email provider that would delete emails after 30 days - but only from my inbox. Maybe we want something like that in Mahara (archiving messages/moving them to folders), because so far when a user doesn't receive his messages my email, there would be no way to keep the messages, even if he considers them important. 

My enhancement so far doesn't delete messages after a certain time but that shouldn't be difficult to implement. 

The 'Deleted user' string makes a lot of sense to me. 

My enhancement so far only touches user messages. So all other messages just depend on the fix for the bug you just filed. 

Thanks

Tobias

30 June 2014, 21:49

Hello Tobias,

This takes us back to the question whether the full message should actually be included in the email notification that the user receives or not. If it were included, we could safely delete the messages (e.g. also include a note at the bottom of the email saying that this message will be deleted from the Mahara inbox on [date]). But that would also mean that someone could send a reply directly to the user or that the message would be sent correctly through Mahara.

I'm a bit hesitant to allow users to reply directly to a message as they would be able to see the email address of the other person. If it is someone spamming other users that wouldn't be so good... If you send messages only through Mahara, your email address is pretty well protected unless you post it on your profile page. ;-)

Cheers

Kristina

01 July 2014, 13:29

If we implemented the "reply by email" functionality in Mahara (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1249895 ) then you wouldn't need to see the other user's actual email address to reply to them by email. We'd use VERP, a technique by which the reply email goes to Mahara, and then Mahara decodes metadata in the email to determine which message it's meant to be a response to.

Conveniently, Mahara already has a VERP infrastructure in place for bounce detection! So in theory it shouldn't be *too* hard to expand that to handle forum and message replies. In theory.

03 July 2014, 1:30

Automatic reply to messages would be a nice feature, that'd let us put the notification context into the email body without having to worry about users that reply to the email instead of logging into mahara and writing the reply from there. But I don't think it answers the question whether to automatically delete messages or not.

The clean up functionality that your bug refers to btw only deletes viewaccess, watchlist and institution messages (and it seems the time span has increased to 6 months). I think the idea is that viewaccess and watchlist notifications and institution messages contain information that you can later still find on other places in the eportfolio. That is not the case for user notifications, though I think it totally makes sense to include forum post and feedback notifications. 

With a lot of notification, it gets really difficult to find specific information because so far you can only filter by the activity type. Thatfor we extended both views to let the user search for keywords in notification body/subject/sender and recipients. We'll happily share that once the first patch is accepted. 

09 July 2014, 20:57

Hello Tobias,

Sorry for having side tracked with the note about the supposedly automatic deletion of messages. It does not solve the question at hand.

Aaron's note about VERP may be the solution: You get the full message in your email, can reply, but the message is still piped through Mahara.

The question though is whether that would be a huge change or not because it wouldn't just affect the user notifications but also forum posts etc. I would think.

And that would still not solve the question of whether messages should be deleted automatically after a certain time or not.

If we continue to delete messages automatically / clean up that functionality to work for all notifications, maybe a sentence could be added to the notification for user messages that they would be deleted after X number of weeks / months?

Cheers

Kristina