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Add capability to nag/pester/request input from a particular participant
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Description

In some cases, it might be nice to have the capability to specifically call for input of a particular person on a revision/task/audit. I'd see this being useful in the following scenario:

A user that is perhaps subscribed to a great many issues many not be paying particularly close attention to some particular subset of those issues. Or perhaps they are, and they go on a couple day bender (or a vacation, not everyone is a raging alcoholic), and come back to a few hundred issue/revision/audit emails and can't be bothered to read through every update that might have happened in their absence to look for questions for them.

The only real way that you can solve this right now is to either:

  1. Track them down in person to ask your question.
  2. Find their email and ask them to look at the issue.
  3. Do nothing and hope they eventually notice.

The way that I'd envision this working one (or both) of two ways:

  • Click on their name from the subscriber list of the task/revision/audit, which opens a text box that I can type my question in, and eventually submit.
  • (Preferred), I put something like "RFI @wotte: blah blah blah". This would also be useful, for example, in inline comments.

Ultimately, this would result in a different email from the Phabricator installation that would be distinguishable from a normal issue update, perhaps with a subject line "RFI: TXXXX". It might also highlight the object requesting their input in the web view.

Perhaps this could be built using Ponder; by providing an easy way to create a Ponder question that is tied to a particular task/revision/audit item.

Event Timeline

wotte raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
wotte updated the task description. (Show Details)
wotte added a subscriber: wotte.
epriestley triaged this task as Wishlist priority.Dec 11 2013, 8:06 PM
epriestley added subscribers: username, epriestley.

Some discussion in T466 and T4087.

I started typing up a longer-form discussion of this issue but it was like 20 pages long and super rambley and not very useful.

The short version is that we're very unlikely to implement a feature like this. We built some nagging stuff at Facebook and it was annoying and not effective. My experience is that issues with review promptness are almost never accidental (e.g., the reviewer forgot, or really was too busy) and are almost always the reviewer avoiding work they don't want to do. Sometimes this is a reasonable choice, but a large part of this problem is social/cultural, at least in the teams I've seen at Facebook.

In Phabricator, you can already do this with: Click Name > Send Message, which will send a Conpherence message, or by simply commenting. (When a username appears as "@username" in text, you can hover over the username and "Send Message" directly.) Outside of Phabricator, you can use email, chat/irc, physically poking people, etc. Adding another channel doesn't seem dramatically more useful than these existing channels.

Users can write mail rules to highlight messages which include their "@username" if they're having trouble managing mail volume. I'm generally not very sympathetic to this complaint, as I'm not sure it's a real phenomenon. When I worked at Facebook and had access to the mail logs on that install, I had more than 10x the volume of the engineers who were the most vocal complainers about mail volume.

The one feature here which I think may be worth doing is putting some kind of special highlight/notification on @mention notifications, in the Notification list. This would mostly cover the "just got back from vacation and have 200 things to look through" case, since it would let you identify the personal ones more quickly. But you can already do this with a simple mail rule in your mail client.

On the culture front, you might want to try to have a culture where the individual seeking feedback can eventually just act if that feedback never comes. For example, if code isn't reviewed in 7 days then the author is permitted to just commit it and move on. This will "break a few eggs" over time but people will figure out they really should review things within the seven day window.

On the tool front, if you use the calendar application to set things like out of office status, it becomes more clear when someone is on a bender, errr vacationing. This can also help a bunch to mitigate the "guy on vacation is overwhelmed when he gets back" problem; in theory you can route issues to people who are actually around and avoid slamming the vacationer. Note the calendar app needs work to be really useful - https://secure.phabricator.com/project/view/542/ - but its great today for simply letting folks know you aren't around (and why).

I'm going to merge this into T4654, which discusses making it easier for users to get notified about mentions of their username. Per discussion above, we don't plan to implement a "nag/pester" feature above and beyond all the other ways you can get in touch with people already.