Send inbox notification to new OpenID accounts upon comment or entry importation

[fiddlingfrog]

Title:
Send inbox notification to new OpenID accounts upon comment or entry importation

Area:
inbox, importer

Summary:
When the importer imports a comment, it should leave a notification in the inbox of the associated OpenID account stating "A comment you left at {original site} has been imported to {Dreamwidth journal/community name}."
When the importer imports an entry from a community import, it should leave a notification in the inbox of the associated OpenID account stating "An entry you wrote in {original community} has been imported to {Dreamwidth community name}.

Description:
Currently OpenID accounts have very little ability to find comments, and soon entries, that have been imported to Dreamwidth. The Recent Comments page only goes back 10 comments, and deleting one of those comments doesn't let another one slide in at the back of the list. Currently the search by poster function [http://foo.dreamwidth.org/?poster=] doesn't work for OpenID accounts, not by using the displayed name {bar.livejournal.com} nor by using the internal name {ext_###}. Unfortunately, it's too database heavy to try and search for all comments and entries an account made anywhere that isn't their journal, so my idea is to give the user a place to start looking themselves.

When the importer imports a journal or community, it should leave a notice in the Dreamwidth inbox of the OpenID account that's been created (or added to) stating what action just happened. It only needs to leave one notification per import.

Under this idea, a user from LiveJournal would log into Dreamwidth for the first time using their OpenID credentials and find an inbox with several notices already waiting for them, like this:

"Comment imported to {Journal A}"
- A comment you left in {Imported journal's original address} has been imported to {Journal A}
"Entry imported to {Community B}"
"Comment imported to {Community B}"
"Comment imported to {Journal C}"

Edit: It's one message per import, not one message per comment/entry.  If you count the community and comment import as a single job, it's up to two message per import.
For example, say somebody decides to import gardening to DW. In my OpenID account's inbox I'd get one notification saying that an entry or entries I posted there had been imported to DW. I'd get another notification saying that comments I had left there had been imported to DW. And that's it.

Upsides: OpenID users feel more in control of imported content.
Downsides: Will probably slow down the importer.

Poll #9001 Send inbox notification to new OpenID accounts upon comment or entry importation

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 59

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
18 (30.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
11 (18.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (8.5%)

(I have no opinion)
25 (42.4%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[alexbayleaf]

I said "with changes" and would like to suggest:

1) *all* users should have a "find comments by me" page that lists all their comments all over the site

2) on import, openid users should get an inbox message that says "XXXX comments imported, see this page for details" rather than one message per comment.

I say this because if, say, a busy roleplaying community were imported, users might find themselves with thousands of messages clogging up their inboxes.

[laitaine]

+1

I also said "with changes" because I am also concerned about point 2. A single email saying "comments you made in journal X have been imported to Dreamwidth" would be preferable to a deluge of emails. Saying the number of comments would be a nice touch.

And point 1 would be amazing! I want that feature.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

As I clarified, I did mean only one message per import. I like your idea for wording the message, how about:

"Comment imported to {Journal A}"
- Comments you left in {Imported journal's original address} have been imported to {Journal A}.
"Entry imported to {Community B}"
- Entries you left in {Imported community's original address} have been imported to {Community B}.
"Comment imported to {Community B}"
- Comments you left in {Imported community's original address} have been imported to {Community B}.

Including the number of comments (X comments you left in {Imported journal's original address} have been imported to {Journal A}.) might slow the import job down too much.

[laitaine]

I honestly wasn't thinking too much about wording, I just wrote some stuff! But yeah, I like it!

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

1) *all* users should have a "find comments by me" page that lists all their comments all over the site
There is Manage Comments, but it does have its limitations, chief among them the fact that it's not a rolling list (getting rid of one of the listed comments won't bring in an older one at the end of the list.)

I say this because if, say, a busy roleplaying community were imported, users might find themselves with thousands of messages clogging up their inboxes.
I did address that in the suggestion. No matter how many comments or entries are imported, the importer only sends one message to each OpenID account per import. For example, say somebody decides to import gardening to DW. I'd get one notification saying that an entry or entries I posted there had been imported to DW. I'd get another notification saying that comments I had left there had been imported to DW. And that's it.

[majorshipper]

I agree! Personally I don't really have to worry about #2, but there's a lot of people to whom it would apply. And, of course, #1 would be amazingah.

[kaberett]

+1

[arethinn]

+1

1) *all* users should have a "find comments by me" page that lists all their comments all over the site

I would think there would be code that's partway there already, since when you delete an account you have the choice to delete all comments, right? I mean, the comments themselves can be found...

[denise]

That's on LJ, not on DW. We don't have that option (and never will) and we can't use their code without significant work anymore.

[kerravonsen]

+1

[laitaine]

Another thought regarding the number of emails sent out. Consider the following:

I import my journal from LJ. MyFriend gets a message telling them that comments they left have been imported. Time passes. I run another import from LJ and all entries and comments since the last import are imported, including some comments from MyFriend.

What happens?
a) MyFriend gets another message because comments were imported in that import job
b) no message is sent to MyFriend because a message was sent last time so they already know that some stuff was imported from my journal to DW.

(a) has the advantage of not needing to check if a message was already sent to each openid for which comments are imported, (b) has the advantage of not sending out unnecessary messages. I don't know how much either the checking or the sending would tie up servers or make stuff take longer.

[kyrielle]

Another option might be to send a single message to the inbox that comments have been imported, and link to as many comments as can fit in the message; however, that might (probably would) put additional load on the importer and slow things down substantially.

Also, it'd be nice if recent comments DID pull another in when you removed one, but that wouldn't be a solution to this since you might not want to delete any of those but still want to find older ones.

[ninetydegrees]

Anybody has any idea how many messages it would represent at times when imports are high? There are currently over 1 million OpenID accounts and I can't imagine how many of these were created during the last two-three weeks. It seems to me notifications can already been delayed when there are lots of them so I wouldn't want this to have any negative impact.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

A bit of winnowing down and we get:
1 andreanall.com
10 marcelle42.livejournal.com
100 naye.livejournal.com
1,000 miasalter.livejournal.com
10,000 schneck128.livejournal.com
100,000 http://users.livejournal.com/_mrx_/
200,000 corvean.livejournal.com
300,000 cafe-dauphin.livejournal.com
400,000 aboxin.livejournal.com
500,000 robotochan.livejournal.com
600,000 morionn.livejournal.com
700,001 abi-2-aki.livejournal.com
800,001 wiltonsstache.livejournal.com
900,001 inez-agnes.livejournal.com
925,029 valota.livejournal.com
950,029 holly66.livejournal.com
975,029 dobraja.livejournal.com
1,000,000 somethingtobind.livejournal.com
1,150,000 1st-floor-boss.livejournal.com
1,170,000 metalidol-key.livejournal.com
1,173,000 fonicdisruption.livejournal.com
1,173,030 trust-instincts.livejournal.com
1,173,031 annoak.livejournal.com

So one million, one hundred seventy-three thousand, and thirty OpenID accounts in total. Now, DW doesn't show the creation date of OpenID accounts like LJ does, but we can infer a bit from the list of users that give access to those OpenID accounts becausse DW does list the creation date for those accounts. The last one (1,173,030) has access from one account that was created today. Okay, moving back a bit, we get to (1,000,000), where a majority of the accounts that grant access were created in the last two weeks. Alright, moving back we end up at (because I only meant to spend five minutes on this, and it's been fifteen already) account (975,029) who is granted access from a sole account, created on November 30th and last updated on December 8th of last year. From this I think we can reasonably assume that a little under 200,000 OpenID accounts were created in the last six weeks.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

1,173,031 was not created when I previewed the comment.

[kyrielle]

Though there might be additional notifications, where an import pulls in comments from someone whose open id is already created by a prior import. And accounts created earlier might still have re-imported / pulled in new comments recently...I'm not sure there's enough public-facing data to really noodle out the impact here.

[eva]

That might be something good, yes.

Actually, the way people handled the import of comments with OpenID accounts is something that really baffled me a while ago: I think a number of people left LJ or at least transferred entries and comments to Dreamwidth at the time when LJ offered the comment reposting function to Facebook and Twitter. People were upset that someone could potentially repost their comments, left LJ in a huff, and then proceeded to repost other people's comments en masse to their Dreamwidth accounts, without even noticing the irony.

Bottom line: Yes, I think it would be good to give people control over their reposted content.

[fizzyblogic]

My "with changes", because this sounds like something that would put enormous strain on the importer and the servers: links to every entry (in communities) and comment (on journals not your own, and communities) on the Manage Comments page. That way there's no notifications, but everyone (OpenID and journal account holders both) get quick, full access to their activity outside their journal (for the journal accounts).