LP should send regular "your request is in the queue" messages

[Andrew Sayers]

When you request a download from Launchpad, it will sometimes tell you to wait while the message is queued, and that you'll be e-mailed shortly. For example, this occurs when downloading a translation. My experience has been that the e-mail is normally received very promptly, but e-mails are taking half an hour or more to arrive today.

Suggestion: if a request remains in the queue for more than 5 minutes, an e-mail should be sent automatically, saying that Launchpad is busy and that you might have to wait a while.

Sending an "in the queue" e-mail will make users less concerned, and will reduce the probability that (like I did), they'll assume that LP has forgotten about them and resubmit their request.

Since some users will find "in the queue" e-mails annoying, so it should be possible to disable them.

Suggestion: each user's e-mail settings page should include a checkbox "notify me when requests remain in the queue for more than 5 minutes". When Launchpad notifies a user that a request has been put in the queue, the notification should include a hyperlink which reads "you {will|will not} be notified if this message stays in the queue for a long time", and which links to the relevant option on the e-mail settings page.

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

The idea is great, though five minutes is probably too short. I'd suggest a different solution: we could give some indication of the export backlog right away, as the user submits a request.

Don't worry too much about resubmitting the request; where one person has multiple requests in the queue, any overlap between them is automatically eliminated.

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

This bug was mentioned in stable r10380 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/10380>

[Jeroen T. Vermeulen (jtv)]

The fix is on edge where it looks fine—but edge doesn't have enough backlog to give us the full experience. Waiting for it to show up on staging.