Categories can be subscribed to. Multiple options, suggest “Watching First Post”
If there is a topic you like, how do you watch it more fully. Notifications can also be done on a per thread basis – e.g. Watching, Muted, etc.
Preferences → Notifications for fine tuning
Feanil: Notifications scheduling is useful here–can set it to only deliver in a narrow time range.
Emails section decides what you get emails about
Robert: has anyone worked out getting emails for any of these? Don’t see these emails.
Defaults to “only when away” – use “always” to get all the updates.
Robert switched.
Bookmark and remind later features.
Shift-? = Keyboard shortcuts for Discourse. g, u (go to unread). g, n (go to new) are especially useful
Confluence
Watching specific Pages (and their subpages)
Almost never watch Spaces (too much noise)
Good places to start:
Organizations
Working groups
Note: Anyone can archive pages if you’re a member
Ned: You can do a daily digest email of everything that’s changed, with links to diffs or the page. Don’t always look at it, but finds useful sometimes.
Go to your profile → Email → Subscribe to daily updates…
Confluence search is terrible. You can use docs.edx.org/search for Google, but will only get public documents
should be moved to docs.openedx.org/search
GitHub
Two schools: Limit what you’re subscribed to vs. filter it all in email.
Can customize per repo exactly what you’re watching for (e.g. Issues vs. Releases, etc.
Notifications → Turn off “Automatically watch repositories”
Ned on theFilter it all in email approach:
Notification Custom Routing is a useful way to separate personal stuff to personal emails vs. work related repos.
Alex: How do you manage your lives? Block off time for checking all of the things? Ad hoc? Segment your days?
Ned: No specific time set aside, cycles through things, varies on day.
Feanil: Don’t look at email/notifications/anything at beginning of day, sets that aside until he’s decided what to do for the day. Want to not get stuck in responding-land.
Ned: Changes based on prioritization, e.g. during decoupling had to really closely watch Wiki activity.
Feanil: Tries to route everything to email, single source to make sure nothing got missed. Except for Slack, which is its own thing. Trying to push the community to Discourse for substantive things.
Dave: Segments time for code-reviews and goes to individual sources for notifications to bucket times (e.g. code reviews in the morning, discourse in evening).
Feanil: Finds it useful to pull everything together. Email is a way of absorbing the general path of how things are moving, and planning future follow-up work.
Ned: Sometimes hard to gauge from email how big something is.
What repos to watch?
Now that we use GitHub issues to track work, some of those repos are useful to watch.
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Email Filtering
Robert used to do lots of filtering but what do you do about having way too many messages to look through period?
Ned: Stars the ones he wants to look at, and move everything to a code review or an issue. Keyboard shortcuts to quickly archive unstarred things.
Ned: Labels for things like when he’s tagged, when olive/nutmeg/other releases are mentioned
Robert: What gets starred?
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Ned has 58 filters, generated via Python code.
Filters out the bots
GitHub sends “to” addresses with the reason you’re getting this email to make filtering easier. GH has really useful headers here (e.g. “list:” has the name of the repo)
But odd gaps. No differentiation between Issues and Pull Requests.
Ned has a tool to produce XML and you can re-import the filter rules in one shot.