Remove "are you sure" page from subscriptions

[Jeff Bailey]

Please do not ask me to confirm when I'm subscribing myself to something. There is almost no harmful side-effects to a stray subscription, and is trivial to undo.

The information about what subscribing does can easily be provided with a tooltip (especially as I only need to read it once), and the status box afterwards that sais "You have been subscribed to this bug." is reasonably clear; I don't think there much risk of someone subscribing and not noticing.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This is sort of a duplicate of bug 6456.

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

From a technical perspective, the subscription needs to go through a post form. Two reasons being:

1. in the future we want to be able to serve GET requests using a readonly connection to the database.

2. if you can subscribe to a bug with a GET request (as would be the case for performing a subscription when the user clicks on the "Subscribe" link in the menu on the right), I can put the following in a web page I control:

<img src="https://launchpad.net/products/malone/+bug/31506/+subscribe" >

or

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://launchpad.net/products/malone/+bug/31506/+subscribe">

Now if you are logged into Launchpad and visit the page, you'll get subscribed to the bug. In the first case, the only indication is a broken image on that page.

So we'd need a button rather than a link on the main bug page to allow one-step subscription.

[Jeff Bailey (jbailey)]

A quick note that this should probably apply to unsubscribe, too.

[David Allouche (ddaa)]

I understand that it's better to use POST requests rather than GET for operations that alter server state.

It is possible to make a normal link send a POST request using JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest. See wikipedia for links to browser implementations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHTTP#External_links
This would allow degrading gracefully in the absence of XMLHttpRequest support in the browser.

About using a button, if we choose to do that, the subscribe button should look exactly like the other nearby items, but I was unable to convince Firefox to make a button look exactly like a link (there was some extra padding). I guess the padding could be cancelled using hard-coded negative margins or such, but that would be too fragile and unportable.

In summary, there seems to be no salute outside of XmlHttpRequest.

[Brad Bollenbach (bradb)]

On 21-Feb-06, at 4:17 AM, David Allouche wrote:

> Public bug report changed:
> https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/31506
>
> Comment:
> I understand that it's better to use POST requests rather than GET for
> operations that alter server state.
>
> It is possible to make a normal link send a POST request using
> JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest. See wikipedia for links to browser
> implementations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHTTP#External_links
> This would allow degrading gracefully in the absence of
> XMLHttpRequest support in the browser.
>
> About using a button, if we choose to do that, the subscribe button
> should look exactly like the other nearby items, but I was unable to
> convince Firefox to make a button look exactly like a link (there was
> some extra padding). I guess the padding could be cancelled using
> hard-
> coded negative margins or such, but that would be too fragile and
> unportable.
>
> In summary, there seems to be no salute outside of XmlHttpRequest.

(Standard) Buttons are often hideous for this kind of thing; they
look ugly, and there's often not enough room for a button.

A POST link and/or a more aesthetically pleasing button design (with
rounded corners) would be a significant improvement to the one-click
user experience, IMHO.

Cheers,

--
Brad Bollenbach

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

You can't make "significant improvement to the one-click user experience" when it doesn't exist!

The solution to this is *technically* quite simple: unsubscribe by unchecking a "Subscribe me" checkbox in the list of subscribers, then click a button on the same page to confirm it together with the rest of the changes you've made to the bug at the same time. Of course if we could do things like that, the bug page would look quite different.

[Brad Bollenbach (bradb)]

I've just landed a fix for bug 977, which eases the pain when the subscriber is adding a comment at same time.