Continuing the discussion from RHBZ#2219489 Review Request: python-spotipy - A light weight Python library for the Spotify Web API:
It seems like when the new Fedora Discussion package review process launched, it is set up so that many people who may not be packagers are receiving notifications by default.
Are there any @admins or @moderators who might know why this is happening? Is there a default setting that we can change for this category?
Preferences â Tracking â Categories â Watched/Tracked â remove Package Review Swaps
I was also surprised why Iâm suddenly getting email notifications from Discourse. I donât get any emails for any other topics that Iâm contributing to, so getting emails for this category is ⌠very unexpected.
Where can one find the âSettingsâ in the web UI?
Click on the icon with your avatar at the top right (same one where your notifications appear), and then the silhouette item at the bottom. From there, Preferences.
Direct links:
For watching / tracking configuration: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/my/preferences/tracking
For email settings: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/my/preferences/emails
Note that my in the URLs above is a âmagicâ endpoint which should redirect to the right place for any logged-in user.
You can also configure watching for any particular category by browsing to that category and selecting the bell icon.
I double-checked, and the category is muted by default; the @packager group is configured to change that to watching for any new members (a one time thing when someone joins the group â it isnât fixed that way).
This seemed like an obvious good idea to me, and I apologize for the surprise. After Flock, weâre looking at making a real Discourse Team so it is no longer At The Whim of Matthew, which is definitely not the proper Fedora way to do things.
Thank you for the direct links, Matt!
It also gave me the opportunity to clean up my mail tagging settings, so⌠win win, i guess 
I seem to have sorted this by heading to Package Review Swaps - Fedora Discussion and hitting âmuteâ there as well (right side most of the way towards the top of the page, looks like a bell icon)
It looks like youâve turned off almost all tag and category notifications â except, News & Announcements (which does not come up very much, since we usually use Community Blog or Announce List subcategories).
I think âconfigure relevant watches in a sensible defaultâ is in general a good thing to do, but probably there also should be a âplease leave my notification settings alone; Iâll handle it!â checkbox.
Do we have some examples of people who are not packagers? There may also be a bugâŚ
I understand now that anyone who is a packager was opted in by default to this category. I feel like this was not the best practice. Even though I am a packager, it is not the primary way I contribute in Fedora. In this way, it felt like I am being subscribed to a new mailing list that I did not consent to.
I think we might want to consider undoing the âwatch by defaultâ option for this group. We should ask for consent first before flipping the bit for a group of users to start watching a new tag or category.
Yes, because I donât want to get emails from Discourse ⌠I thought we wanted to get rid of mailing lists, not bring them back through the back door
There are two different things here, really, email and notification. Watching a group or tag doesnât turn on email per se, but there is this setting:
Mine is set to never â but yours is set to âonly when awayâ.
To me, it seems nice for my notification preference defaults[1] to correspond to the Fedora groups Iâm in. It seems like a way to make some areas of the site visible to those theyâre relevant to without overwhelming everyone else.
I didnât want anyone to miss something they might care about. Specifically, didnât want anyone watching Project Discussion / package-maintainers to not realize that these posts arenât going there anymore and miss them.
This might not have been the best way to address this, but thatâs what I was thinking. 
I definitely get the âunwillingly signed up to new mailing listâ analog, though. What if we change it to âTrackingâ? That will un-mute the category for that user, and cause the category to display a count of new posts (thatâs whatâs tracked with that setting) in the web UI. I wonât change it again for existing site members, though!
I think making it a question could be kind of annoying in its own way, though. Justin, I see that you are in 31 groups. Would you really want to be bombarded by some two dozen prompts shortly after your first login to Discourse?
And there are defaults â for all new users, some categories are set to be watched, others left âregularâ, others watch-first-post only] âŠď¸
By which I mean âI donât plan toâ, not âI refuse toâ.
After a flood of unwanted spam I hit the unsubscribe link included in the spam 
I am sorry about that. Itâs good to know that the unsubscribe was included properly and worked, at least!
This is a better default, although I still do not like the idea of changing peopleâs default notifications without their explicit consent.
We are crawling into sensitive territory here though. People set up their notifications in the way that they set up their notifications. For example, unexpected changes to my notification preferences has honestly made keeping up with Discourse hard for me personally. I am often overwhelmed with Discourse in a way that I was not with mailing lists.
Is this to say that you would not undo this change and keep sponsored packagers subscribed to this category anyways? Iâm not sure how I feel about that.
Normally Discourse has an option when changing site-wide defaults about whether you want to apply this change only to new accounts or to all accounts regardless of whether they have it configured it. Did this option not come up when setting up the group to automatically watch the category?
If it did not, could we ask the Discourse developers to make sure that option works for group-level notifications and not just site-wide notifications? I have a very strong opinion that we should not change notifications for existing users without their explicit consent.
I would want it to be a manual process especially because I am in many groups. I might be a member of some groups but not wish to follow every post and conversation. I might not be in a group but still want to follow every post and conversation in another tag. Group membership does not correlate to my notification preferences for discussion.
Pre-configured defaults for new users is one thing, but the Fedora Discussion site has grown a lot since we launched in June/July 2018. We cannot change notification preferences for other users without first asking for their consent. Otherwise, I have a hard time seeing the difference between creating a new Mailman list and mass-subscribing a bunch of people based on a FAS group email dump. I donât like that⌠
Maybe I did not explain this well enough. The global default for this category is âmutedâ, which effectively hides it. One can find it and unhide it, but itâs not particularly obvious. Setting the category to ânormalâ would unhide it, without enabling any notifications. âTrackingâ is one step up from that â still no notifications, but new topics will show up in https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/unread.
I mean, I guess we could, but just seems like following up a mistake with more chaos. Suddenly, packagers who want to be watching the category wonât.
It has the same behavior. But, at the time I set it, the @packaging group was new, and so had no members. We could use this to change the setting for everyone, if thatâs what we think is best.
Sure â I certainly wouldnât suggest we force it. But it seems to me like a reasonable way to set defaults, and you can manually review and change things as you like. I donât think you really want 31 different âconsentâ prompts, do you? Iâd rather have an introductory message saying:
Notification defaults are set based on Fedora account group membership. You can:To expand on this a bit: I think the @packager group (followed closely by the quality team[1] is an outlier. I shouldnât have set that to âWatchingâ, because it affects so many people. Most teams are much smaller, and I think itâs reasonable for each team to decide what effects they want membership to have. (Again, they can be changed â and as also noted, if you want, all email notifications can be turned off.)
I think @council @fesco and @mindshare should subscribe new members to the corresponding tags, for example.
group name change from @qa in progress! âŠď¸
Ugh. From my point of view, I have been subscribed without my knowledge to a new category. I am now receiving mails for new posts, which land in my Inbox â if I had made a conscious choice on this, I would have created a filter, but since the choice was made for me, I donât have a filter.
The alternative is that I now need to spend 15 minutes to read Discourse-specific instructions with Discourse-specific names of settings and choices to get rid of this.
Now multiply this with the number of members of the packagers group that isnât actively using Discourse. Even if half of the 531 members of the packagers group are actively using Discourse, thatâs now 66 hours of effort that you caused other people.
Please reconsider and change this default for everybody.