Strange automatic Weekly notifications

Context: Wiki hosted on the community farm myxwiki.org

Hi all,

I’m receiving each week the following automatic notification for changes I’ve not done to my “personal notification settings pages”:

image

Is it a bug or just a wrong setup on myxwiki.org (global) or only on my wiki?

Thanks for your help,

This is because these pages contain the last fire date for the scheduler jobs (as a xproperty) and it’s modified with the defined user, i.e. you (by default).

FTM, you could decide to unwatch these scheduler pages I guess.

Another option is to change the user used to send the notifications. See https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Scheduler%20Application#HAdvanced

Note: I haven’t checked the code to see if this job context user is also the user used to edit the fire date or not. To be tested.

@vmassol thanks for your reply :+1:.

Unfortunately I do not understand any of your explanation nor suggestion to change this behavior :disappointed_relieved::

  • What is the interest to change the user which sends the notifications? The notification will still be sent but just by an other user …
  • The question I’m asking myself is: what’s the purpose of the schedule job to change the JobClass(0) from “None” to “Normal” on 4 pages each week?
  • Furthermore I’m not able to unsubscribe from theses pages: for instance going to https://tutos.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Mail/MailResender
  1. the “bell icon” is greyed => telling user he won’t be warned on changes
  2. when clicking on the bell to force an “un-subscription” => an endless loader is displayed like shown in the below screen shot …
    image

Waiting for your advices,

I’ve now checked the code and the job context user is not used to update the job doc. It’s the last author of that doc that is used. And yes if you watch this page it doesn’t matter who makes changes to it, you’ll still get the notifications :wink: (so forget this idea!).

Good question. This is the status of the job but normally, once a job is scheduled, it should moved from None to Normal and not change afterwards. Something to debug.

What changes do you get for the Notification Email Daily Sender job?

Seems like a bug of myxwiki.org. To be debugged too. Note that I’m not allowed to view https://tutos.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Mail/MailResender

Someone should try locally on XS to see if the problem can be reproduced.

Hello xrichard,

there is a particular behaviour of the notifications that is a little less intuitive than it should, which is that when you haven’t subscribed to any page in your wiki, the system sends notifications for all changes on the wiki. There is a discussion about changing this behaviour, see https://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-19070 and related.
As Vincent mentioned, the changes on these pages are somewhat technical changes, so indeed, if you receive notifications for all changes they would be confusing.
Speaking of technical changes, did you, by any chance, activate the display of hidden pages in your user profile? This could explain why you’re seeing pages like these, which are technical and thus should be hidden…

Now, if you receive notifications for pages that you don’t know about, you may be in this ‘default’ case, when you’re not subscribed to anything and thus subscribed to everything. You should see what you’re subscribed to in your used profile, in the notifications section, in the “Custom filters” section - if it’s empty than you have no subscription and you are in the case of “not subscribed to anything means subscribed to everything”.

To get rid of these unwanted things, you have 2 choices as Vincent mentioned:

  • either you blacklist (exclude) the 3 bothering pages
  • either you subscribe explicitly to the content you want to receive notifications for.

I hope this helps, don’t hesitate,
Anca

I would have loved to perform this exclusion but, as stated earlier (see screen capture above), I’m not able to unsubscribe to these 3 pages because clicking on the bell returns an endless loader :open_mouth: instead of the regular choice to Activate/Deactivate subscription to page.

Note: this faulty subscription behavior occurs on all my Wiki pages hosted on mywiki.org.

Hello xrichard,

while waiting for the bell bug to be fixed, you can manually add a filter to exclude those pages from your user profile page, the notifications tab, like this: in the “Custom filters” table, click “add filter”. Then, in the popup that follows, which should be something like this:

image

you need to chose the page(s) that you want to exclude - in the location area -, then choose “Ignore events” for the action and then you’d probably want to select all the events (since you want to exclude all types of events coming from those pages), both chanels and then save.

The whole UI for administering filters is described here https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Notifications%20Application/#HFilters .

As I mentioned in my previous comment, you can also use this mechanism to add an inclusive filter for the pages that you’re interested in (Action: “Notify of the event”), which will have as a side-effect the automatic exclusion of everything else, which may also be a solution for your issue.

Enjoy XWiki,
Anca

Hello,

Many thanks @lucaa :champagne:. With your detailled help I finally managed to exclude the 3 annoying pages from my notification list
image

… need to wait until sunday night to confirm I do not receive any automatic email.

Note: User experience here can be improved a bit : page search do not work, wiki are sorted “randomly” in the list, tree organization is everything but friendly, multi-pages selection can be done using Ctrl key (no check box). I can also add that the “Add filtrer” leading to all the screen detailed above is quite hidden.

Without your help … sure I will have given up far far earlier :open_mouth:.

Hello xrichard,

happy I could be of help.

thanks for your feedback about this screen, it’s really useful to get some information about how this screen feels for someone that is not familiar with the system.
As I was saying, there are lots of improvements on the TODO list about the handling of notifications, defaults & filters, including polishing the user experience. Learning how it feels for a ‘regular user’ like you would contribute to help us making smarter choices about it.

Thanks a lot,

Still not solved (I’m still striving to remove unwanted weekly notification on system page I have not changed :confused:), see new discussion opened here: Receiving weekly notification for Page exluded from Notification - #3 by xrichard