In my administrator/management role, I create a blog for someone else to write posts for

Why?

Specifically, a root problem would be how you got into this state to request this feature to begin with, not that you want the feature.

In T11687#195734, @chad wrote:

In my administrator/management role, I create a blog for someone else to write posts for

Why?

Partly because of T11689. We have had some rogue objects created in the past, which is a pain, so have restricted blog creation to admins after turning on Phame.

Also, we are about to onboard an overseas team. Communication is limited, so to get them up and running as soon as possible, I will want to create infrastructure for them, such as a news blog, but I don't want to get all the posts after doing so.

In fact, I imagine this will be a problem whenever one's job role changes, so blog responsibility is passed on to somebody else in the organisation. The original creator has no way to 'resign' from the blog. But that's speculation, not an immediate need.

As I said, we have only just started using it, but these are the problems we have encountered so far which we are 'living with' rather than having a satisfying workaround.

Aside from that, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that as a general principle, permanent/irrevocable subscription to an object is tantamount to spam.

My concern here is the specific request only solves a side-effect of the root problem, and not the root problem itself. We do not expect admins to have to create blogs for people. I would like to understand better what we can do in that case.

Continuing on, can you explain why people were creating so many blogs and what problems the creation and abandonment were causing to your install? As an admin, you should be able to unlock and archive any hijinks. And objects created and left should not cause any problem (just like Maniphest or other applications).

My concern here is the specific request only solves a side-effect of the root problem, and not the root problem itself.

I think this 'parent root problem' is a social one that can't be solved with software. Our team is quite diverse, with some members very technical, and others bordering on illiterate when it comes to post-90s technology. Nevertheless, they all have their roles to play, and it's good having them on Phab. However, they get overwhelmed/frustrated easily by many options, and will click/do things without really understanding. It minimises my work as an admin if we keep the UI as focused on our actual work as possible (so I have disabled a number of applications, but have been slowly turning them on once the benefit outweighs the learning curve).

Once we have further customisation of the home screen, according to user roles as you've been mocking, we will almost certainly benefit from that, as we can present a slimmer UI to less technical staff.

We do not expect admins to have to create blogs for people. I would like to understand better what we can do in that case.

These aren't personal blogs, but 'role blogs' for company purposes. It's more "create a blog for a department" than "for people" and as such is more an administrative duty than a personal one anyway.

Continuing on, can you explain why people were creating so many blogs and what problems the creation and abandonment were causing to your install?

People haven't created blogs by accident, but tasks and mocks, if I remember correctly. The issue is more a social one than a technical one: user frustration and admin workload.

As an admin, you should be able to unlock and archive any hijinks. And objects created and left should not cause any problem (just like Maniphest or other applications).

I do this. And it's only a small amount of work to do so. But the user frustration is a harder problem to address.

Looks like this is moot anyway as you've addressed the 'side effect' of our workflow, which is the lack of blog unsubscription in your recent commit.

Thanks, Chad. I've just used the Administrators group and adjusted the EditEngine permissions, which is sufficient for us; anyone authoritative enough to create blogs is authoritative and technically proficient enough to have admin privs, too.

Killing off the auto-subscribe is all I was hoping for.

Our other problems related to this are, I believe, outside the scope of Phabricator.