Hi everyone,
I’m coming back with some new questions related to notifications, and this time about the capability to follow a user.
Since XWiki 16.5.0RC1 if you go to a user profile page, you will something like this:
There’s 2 things bothering me here:
- You can only follow or unfollow a user: you can never block them
- There’s two buttons related to the watch activity: the following button, and the watch setting “Not set” button next to the Create button
Follow / Unfollow / Block user
Historically it’s possible in XWiki to follow or block page / space / wiki. With our recent changes we tried to hide a bit the capability to block page / space / wiki since it’s discouraged, but it’s at least still possible to block a page or a space from the modal watch setting.
On the other hand apparently from a user profile it has never been possible to block a user, and I’m a bit surprised: sounds like it could be a legit usecase to me to be able to completely mute a user.
Now maybe that if we didn’t get any request since then, it’s not a real need? wdyt?
Watch user vs. watch user profile page
IMO there’s a problem with having 2 buttons for the watch activity in user profile page. Note that it’s more exposed since XWiki 16.5.0RC1 with the move of watch settings, but this inconsistency was already there through the watch settings.
Now if I’m being honest it’s not entirely an inconsistency: using the standard watch settings only impact watching the page (or the space) containing information about the user, while using the follow button in the user profile impacts watching the user itself.
It has a meaning on the behaviour of the filters: if you follow the user profile page, you will get notifications whenever something change in that page, even if it’s another user who made the change (e.g. Bar makes a new comment in the profile of Foo), while if you follow a user, you will get notifications when a user performs changes (e.g. Foo creates a new page).
Now this is subtle and I genuinely doubt that this will be obvious for someone using XWiki. So I think I’d be in favor of simplifying a bit this to only keep a single watch buttons, the standard one next to Create button (for now at least), but which would then propose options for both watching the user AND the user profile page when opened.
wdyt?