Notify contributors when orphaning occurs

[Graham Perrin]

Suggestions

When a parent post is deleted:

* notify remaining contributors that their topic is an orphan.

When a post is removed from a topic or forum:

* notify the author of that post, and authors of replies.

Motivation

A timely alert that a topic is misplaced, followed by timely placement in a suitable location, can reduce the likelihood of inappropriate scheduling for deletion.

Considerations

The user may stumble across orphans after taking the menu route to My posts, but it would be nicer to receive notification at the time — not stumble across things, late.

Not all users make regular visits to My posts. (Off-topic: should there be something like a personal dashboard in Nabble?)

Methods of notification

1. Ideally, in the web interface to Nabble: a discreet signal alongside the username. <http://n2.nabble.com/-tp4131246p4759564.html> notes that implementation may require considerable effort (JavaScript, embedding etc.) so I don't imagine this feature in the near future.  

A supersmart implementation would cater for users with multiple identities. (Example: a person with two identities john1 and john2, an item posted by john2 is orphaned, the generic signal/alert — of something somewhere deserving attention — is presented when that person is logged in as john1.)
 
2. E-mail.

Side note

I thought I made the suggestion re: orphaning and notifications long ago, but I can't find the post.

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Graham Perrin wrote

When a parent post is deleted:

* notify remaining contributors that their topic is an orphan.

Deleted posts don't remove the branch anymore. If a user deletes a post, the message text is replaced by "CONTENTS DELETED..." and the thread structure stays intact. So this specific alert doesn't make sense.

Graham Perrin wrote

When a post is removed from a topic or forum:

* notify the author of that post, and authors of replies.

If the post is orphan, it might have been removed by the garbage collector that deleted the parent and not by a specific Nabble user. I remember you recently posted about some of your nodes being deleted and this might have caused the problem. Do you confirm? Or is the parent still available somewhere?

Posts can only be manually removed by the forum owner or authors of anscestor nodes. The primary intention is to get rid of spam and I don't think spammers should be notified in such cases. So this notification shouldn't be for everyone. In any case, removed posts would be caught by the garbage collector and the author would receive an email. So the only difference is that it would be delayed and you wouldn't know who removed it.

[Graham Perrin]

Hugo <Nabble> wrote

Deleted posts don't remove the branch anymore. If a user deletes a post, the message text is replaced by "CONTENTS DELETED..." and the thread structure stays intact.

Smart! I wasn't aware of that improvement.

I don't think spammers should be notified …

Agreed, I did wonder about that before posting.

It's unfortunate that respectful users might be bucketed with spammers in the 'don't notify' policy, but since (as noted above) thread structures stay intact, I guess that orphaning is far less likely to hit respectful users.

I'll treat this topic as resolved (and look forward to a less aggressive garbage collection … a month's notice would be far more reasonable).

Thanks
Graham