Make it easier to unsubscribe from trac email notifications about plugins

[tobifjellner]

Under a plugin's "Development" tab (for example: ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/#developers ) a logged-in user can accidentally get subscribed to email updates about the plugin from Plugins' Trac.

One just needs to click once on "email" in the sentence "...or subscribe to the development log by email or RSS." and start receiving emails.

1. There should be a clearer indication of the current subscription status in the development page.
2. The emails from Trac should include information about where to unsubscribe.
3. There should be some place where a user could see all their current Trac subscriptions of this type, and perhaps one button to unsubscribe from them all.

I'm filing this under "plugins", since the main UI for this problem is located there.

[Otto42]

There has been confusion about that particular thing in the past, but it's rare. Like once maybe every 6 months kind of thing.

I'm open to suggestion on how to indicate that better, but it really isn't a major problem for us.

[Otto42]

Also, this is not a trac subscription. It is entirely custom code for wordpress.org. Changing the wording or display of that is relatively easy.

[dd32]

There should be a clearer indication of the current subscription status in the development page.

Agreed, it should be made clear that the user is subscribed and the action is now to unsubscribe.

I feel like users would click this link to find out how to subscribe by email potentially.

The emails from Trac should include information about where to unsubscribe.

It is entirely custom code for wordpress.org. Changing the wording or display of that is relatively easy.

Unfortunately these are emailed by SVN via svnnotify so we have limited ability to customize the emails. It's not custom WordPress.org code at all.

However, ​it has a --footer parameter which we could set to something like To unsubscribe, please visit https://wordpress.org/plugins/$SLUG/#developers. It wouldn't fix all cases, as it wouldn't be per-user specific, and they'd need to login as the appropriate user.

There should be some place where a user could see all their current Trac subscriptions of this type, and perhaps one button to unsubscribe from them all.

Agreed, this is a problem we have on most of our bulk emails, ​the support subscriptions is the closest thing we have to this, but it obviously doesn't cover plugins.

but it really isn't a major problem for us.

This isn't quite true; while we might get very few reports about it, it probably only increases the number of emails we send that the receiver feels is spam, which causes email deliverability problems for others. Recently I noticed the number of users subscribed to some plugins was far higher than I'd have expected users to actually want.

[dd32]

Replying to dd32:

However, ​it has a --footer parameter which we could set to something like To unsubscribe, please visit https://wordpress.org/plugins/$SLUG/#developers. It wouldn't fix all cases, as it wouldn't be per-user specific, and they'd need to login as the appropriate user.

Actually, upon looking at it, the post-commit hook is something similar to this:

IFS=" "
emails=$(curl -s "https://api.wordpress.org/ ..to return 'user@example.com user2@example.org ..'...." )
for email in $emails; do
    /usr/bin/svnnotify -t $email --ticket-url http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/%s [...]
done

Based on that, we can definitely make the footer per-user-specific and include an unsubscription link, but it'll require some additional changes to the API.

[whistlerdan]

Ok, so how do I unsubscribe then? I am such a user that is getting emails from the trac system, and I have absolutely no clue how it started or how to stop it.

I have been to the ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/PLUGIN_NAME/#developers page while I am logged in, and there is no indication that I'm subscribed to these emails that seem to be diff reports from recent updates.

[dd32]

@whistlerdan I've sent you an email directly, if you can forward one of the emails in response I'll get you removed. Your current account does not have any commit subscriptions though, which explains why you can't see the removal option when logged in.

[dd32]

In 14553:

Plugin Directory: Make it clearer (and double-confirm) that a user wants to subscribe to plugin commit emails.

See #7505.
Fixes #7882.

[dd32]

In the above I've changed the subscribe UI to this:

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

You can also subscribe to emails for each plugin commit by clicking here.

When you're subscribed, it's also a blue info box to draw attention.

I still don't love this UI of clicking a link, but it's better than no change.

I've left this ticket open as the actual emails should also be much clearer on how to unsubscribe.

I also believe the plugins.svn post-commit process timing out for larger plugins may be partially related to this, as svnnotify is called for each email address individually, causing a svn diff /old/path /new/path for each committer & subscribed email.. I don't believe that would be a fast process.. For Gutenberg for example it looks like that's running ~40 times.
Switching svnnotify out for a custom process would allow adding proper unsub headers and maybe speed up that post-processing.