Open Stack

Hi all,

I wanted to start a discussion around the default email settings for new
accounts on ask.openstack.org

There are five settings [default in braces] for the types of emails
askbot sends regarding questions and answers:

1. Asked by me [instantly]
2. Answered by me [daily]
3. Individually selected [instantly]
4. Entire forum (tag filtered) [weekly]
5. Comments and posts mentioning me [instantly]

1,2,3 & 5 are obviously about things that have some direct relation to
you or your activity on the site. It seems pretty reasonable to me that
you want to find out about those pretty quickly in many cases.

Number 4 is more unusual, since the software tries to guess what you
might be interested in seeing based on a filter of tags:

* show all tags
* exclude ignored tags [default]
* only interesting tags
* only subscribed tags

So, essentially all users who don't meticulously change their email
settings will receive a weekly email with a random list of 7 questions,
titled something like: "[Ask OpenStack] 7 updates about "virtio",
"network", "neutron", "subnet", "requirements" and more".


There are arguments for this behaviour - mainly it encourages return
visits to the site and potentially results in solving questions that
might otherwise not be seen.

The are also arguments against this behaviour - for example our tags are
normally very broad: eg nova, neutron, compute, juno meaning tags the
software thinks are interesting for you may not be or that this
behaviour is unexpected because you didn't explicitly subscribe.



So, what do you think? Where is the sweet spot in these email settings?



Regards,



Tom