Collapse watching and notifications for ticket creators

[danielbachhuber]

When I just created a ticket, this was an unexpected result:

I expected that "watching" and "notifications" are one and the same — when I create a new ticket, I'm watching the ticket by default. If I don't want the notifications, I can unwatch the ticket.

[nacin]

I agonized over how notifications should work for a while. It was designed to have three states, all in one:

• receiving notifications for a ticket due to properties (milestone, component, focus, reporter, owner, participant)
• explicitly watching a ticket, thus adding it to your favorites, and always receiving notifications, even if the corresponding property changes
• explicitly blocking the implicit notifications

So yeah, it's possible to actually be a reporter and block notifications to one of your tickets. At first this sounds odd, but at the same time, sometime tickets go way beyond the reporter and turn into monster tickets. Think ​https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=236298 or plenty of tickets on core trac.

I agree that it's a bit odd that a reporter isn't already "Watching" a ticket upon creation. A reporter change doesn't happen in practice, so they don't need to worry about a property change causing them to no longer be watching their ticket. But maybe it's the wording. Maybe if you're implicitly receiving notifications, "Watch this ticket" should simply read "Star this ticket" or "Favorite this ticket".

[danielbachhuber]

So yeah, it's possible to actually be a reporter and block notifications to one of your tickets.

In my simpleton mind, this could be achievable by auto-starring any tickets you open. If you want to unsubscribe, you unstar the ticket.

Similarly, following a component, milestone, etc. means you'll be auto-starred for any new tickets. Unfollow to unstar.

But, as I've described means less control to the user — favoriting means getting email notifications and getting email notifications means favoriting. I do understand the desire to potentially favorite a subset of those tickets you get email notifications for.

With this in mind, I think I'd still encourage the act of creating a ticket to automatically favorite that ticket. It seems implied that if you create a ticket, it will be one of your favorites.

It would probably also be nice to have a canonical page somewhere for how all of the notification behavior works. I suspect this is it: ​https://make.wordpress.org/core/notifications/