Service notifications

[rossjrw]

From time to time I may wish to notify users of changes to the notification service. A big one will be #77.

Couple of ways I could go about this:

• A thread that all users are always autosubscribed to.

  • I like the idea of using the service in a meta way like this, with minimal added functionality.
  • Users would still be able to manually unsubscribe if they really wanted to.
  • I'd have to be absolutely perfectly 100% certain that only I can post in that thread. I'd have to make sure to only do it for really important things.
  • I'd want the OP of that thread to not be notified about, only posts in it. A global override could work for this.
  • The concept of 'has user X seen service notification Y?' is always answered, provided that my logic around notification guaranteeability is sound.
  • Batching service notifications to users who don't receive notifications very often is handled by the current notification system.
  • Downside: users may go ahead and ignore the notification, as only the snippet would be visible.
  • Downside: there's no way to passively delay the service notification until the user would have been notified by something else. It's a notification, so they receive it immediately.

• A custom thingy that inlines service notifications directly.

  • I can do whatever I want with the notification, e.g. send immediately or wait until the user would be notified.
  • I'll need to track on a per-user basis what service notifications they've seen, so I can always catch them up to speed.
  • I can put the full body of the notification right into the digest.
  • Downside: I can't quickly go and fix a mistake I made in the text and hope that there's still a lot of users who won't have seen it yet.
  • Downside: Service notifications will be commited to version control unless I find some way to store them elsewhere.

• A mix of the above - a forum thread somewhere, with special logic natively implemented.

  • The database doesn't have the option to store the full thread text, so it would still need to be a snippet.
  • The special logic could make the 'notification' not appear when checking if a user has notifications, but only when gathering notifications for a user, so it would not prompt a digest if it's the only item.
  • The special logic could put the notification at the top of the digest.
  • I can write the post with the snippet's restrictions in mind, to make it appear intentional.
  • The special logic could add decoration to the notification, e.g. 'Read more'