E-mail notifications for reactions

[glen-84]

It might be best if this option is disabled by default (large volumes of e-mail).

[TPS]

Maybe as a configurable (rate-limited) volume- or time-based option? Maybe first 1, 10, 100, &c or every 10 👍s, or a summary of all reactions every week? I can't imagine anyone who'd want an e-mail for every reaction every time.

[lamont-granquist]

PLEASE make this option OFF by default. Or have some big button I can mash to make it ALL go away like some kind of nightmare that I can wake up from.

I already have to wade through too much github e-mail and there's insufficient ways to manage and control it all.

[TPS]

So, @lamont-granquist, https://github.com/settings/emails & https://github.com/settings/notifications don't cover you now?

[lamont-granquist]

Not remotely close.

• I need a way to unsubscribe from e-mail followups to all of my commits. They're invariably low quality complaints. I would prefer not to see any of them in my inbox.
• I also need a way to manage every thread that I'm subscribed to. I particularly want to be able to unsubscribe to every closed ticket and issue that I'm currently subscribed to. I'd also like the ability to lock any issue or PR that has been closed for more than a month to force users to open new issues (if they can't be bothered enough to open a new issue, I can guarantee you we can't be bothered to reconsider an old closed one).
• I don't even care about the vast majority of the open ticket and issues that I'm currently subscribed to which simply don't have any time to get to them. These days my response to someone pinging an issue with "any updates on this issue?" is just to whack "unsubscribe" and i'd like to automate that so that I don't see it in my inbox the first time.

And this is the reality of working on a project with hundreds and hundreds of open issues (even after having a weekly triage process to try to get some timely responses on them. There are going to be hundreds of legit issues that are going to get lower priorities than other issues and get queue starved -- for the people who hit those issues it sucks to be them, but its completely non-productive and frustrating to get their complaints showing up in e-mail on a daily basis.

Pretty much the only e-mails I want to get are current open issues where I'm actively working on solving them or reviewing or writing code that is getting written. We have a triage process where we block out chunks of time every week to searching through issues and PRs and grooming them. Outside of that, I don't need /anyone/ pinging me. For my own sanity, I just can't care, because there's nothing I can do about it.

[TPS]

@lamont-granquist I think it'd be quite useful if you create (& then unsubscribe from 😉) an issue for each of the • points & subpoints above.

#229 seems to have some relevance for you, also.

[lamont-granquist]

I can do that. Somewhere there's an open issue already about getting the list of subscribed to issues through the API. I went through that exercise a few days ago and what I found is that I can ultimately get back the list of subscribed-to-threads from the API, but to 'click the unsubscribe button' programmatically you need to know the 'thread id' which you can only pull off of the notifications page /after/ a notification actually comes through. What the webpage does is an AJAX call to an internal API that requires a web session, and that's where my knowledge of how to fake-out being a browser kind of hit a wall...

[lamont-granquist]

#633 #634 #635 all cut

[BBI-YggyKing]

On a low-volume repository (such as the private one I share with coworkers) I would like an email notification when someone adds a reaction to a thread. Is this currently possible? I don't see any setting under notifications to control emails when people add reactions.

Oh, I see, that's exactly the issue this is about, and the discussion is about making it off by default (which I'm perfectly fine with).

[marktani]

Any new thoughts about this feature request? This would be tremendously helpful for a few projects

[ghost]

I'm on GitHub pretty much every day, throughout the day, and I think a simple passive list of reactions with a "new reactions" indicator would work great for this.

The list would be another tab in addition to "Notifications" and "Watching" on the notifications page. And the indicator could be something to accompany the little blue dot. This could be a number (reaction count) in one of the other corners to indicate that there are "Reaction" notifications. Or perhaps better, just a little emoji face (or yellow dot?) to the left of the blue dot (but the same size). This would be mostly harmless insofar as visual noise for those with a great many reactions, but it would be greatly utilized by us mere mortals. 😉

Once this feature is implemented, then you can address the emailing options/configurability depending on how popular this tab is. If it's very popular, then give it more love via configurability. If it isn't (which would surprise me), then don't.

Consequently, I would consider renaming this issue to be a more generic "Reaction notifications".

EDIT: Now if only I could be notified if people give this the thumbs up or down here... hrmm... 🤔

[li-boxuan]

I want to receive notifications for reactions. Is there any third-party tool for that?

[weitzhandler]

👍

This is very compelling.

I would change the title to an in-site "notification", rather than email.
It should be off by default, and should be configurable so that we can request to be notified only for reactions on first comment (i.e. the main issue), excluding the follow up comments.

[arderyp]

I'd still like to see this. I often ask people questions and they respond with thumb-up reactions (indicating for me to proceed), but I don't notice for hours/days until I check the issues again manually.

[dkarlovi]

@arderyp I've upvoted your comment to agree, I know you'll not know otherwise. 👼

This comment is meant to highlight one other important issue IMO: the reaction notification goes to the author of the content we're reacting to, but since currently they'll not know about it, you need to mention them and notify everyone in the thread, most of which shouldn't get that notification. Making the reactions dispatch notifications actually makes the conversation more precise.