Services disabled/blacklisted on staging are not documented well

[Tiefflieger]

It would be nice if staging would somehow tell what is working like in the live version, and what does not.

Maybe something like these neat info-box at the top that inform you about things that just happened? They could say something like
"This is staging area. If it was not, mails would have been sent to all subscribers"
or
"This is staging area. Therefore the branches listed here actually do not exist" (see https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/65927 )
So far I don't know any other differences between live and staging.

Thanks for Launchpad!

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

Hi!

Staging has a background all filled with the word "demo", that differentiates lpnet/edge (production data) from staging (demo :)). Did you realize that?

HTH!

Ursula

[Tiefflieger (tiefflieger)]

Yes, absolutely :-)
But the purpose of this demo is that I can play around with launchpad. This way I can figure out how things work, without having to care about any consequences. All changes made will be overwritten, but beside of that, staging is supposed to behave just like production area does.
If it does not, I wonder why - my mistake? Bug? Feature disabled in staging with good cause?

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

So you want Launchpad as production, fully functional, sending emails and so on, but on staging?

[Tiefflieger (tiefflieger)]

Not at all.
But staging is a playground for testing functionalities - if staging doesn't behave as production does, I'd like to know it. Otherwise I wonder if I did a mistake, if its a bug, or if this feature has been disabled in staging on purpose.

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

Email is a bit different from production because we don't want the staging instance emailing real users while people are testing stuff. Email work on staging, we just intercept them before they leave the data center and deliver them to a mailbox LP developers can access. (See bug 321493).

I think this is a valid bug report. Adding some text on each of the main application home pages (i.e. bugs.staging.launchpad.net, code.staging.launchpad.net, etc) explaining what's been disabled for that application would be a good start.