When muting a bug your name disappears from the subscribers list but doesn't re-appear when unmuting

[Matthew Revell]

I reported a bug. My name showed up in the subscribers list.

I muted the bug. My name was removed from the subscribers list. Is this the intended behaviour? I'm assuming so because this list is useful to see who'll get email about the change you're making. Perhaps it should be renamed to "Active subscribers".

I unmuted the bug. My name didn't reappear. That seems broken.

[Gary Poster (gary)]

This is an aside.

Matthew said "I'm assuming so because this list is useful to see who'll get email about the change you're making. Perhaps it should be renamed to "Active subscribers"."

Per the discussion on https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/BetterBugSubscriptionsAndNotifications/FeatureReviewNotes-2011-04-25 in the section titled "Disable the display of the list of subscribers," the list of subscribers now shows only the direct subscribers, not the structural subscribers. The entire concept of a list of subscribers is now problematic, because, now that we have all of these nice notification filtering features, we cannot tell who will get email about the change you are making until you have made it. This is true of both structural subscriptions (now hidden for people with the feature flags turned on) and direct subscriptions (now exposed) but the direct subscriptions also let you modify your subscriptions and team subscriptions. I think this is a significant potential source of confusion, and Matthew's comment supports that, because no, it is not useful to see who will get email.

Would a word change help?

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Regarding "brokenness": the name does re-appear if one chooses "unmute and subscribe".

"Mute" action at the moment removes any previous direct subscriptions, which is very unfortunate (as Gary has said so many times already). However, that means that it is impossible for us to restore the previous direct subscription when one simply "unmutes".

Should bug reporters get their direct subscriptions reinstated? Should we improve the wording on this form further? Most of that is bug 770342 though.

[Gary Poster (gary)]

We are marking this invalid, because it is behaving as expected: if you directly subscribe; and then mute; and then unmute *selecting the option to subscribe again* ("unmute bug mail from this bug and subscribe me to it.") then you will be re-added to the subscriber list. If you don't choose to be subscribed to it when you unmute, then you will not be a subscriber, and so you will not be added to the subscriber list.

As with bug 770342, the heart of the problem is that muting and unmuting is done via a direct subscription. This is a separate bug, and one that we hope to not have to address, because we believe that changing that decision, which we inherited from work done by the Malone team in 2010, will cause a very large amount of restructuring, which I estimate as at least a couple weeks of work for everything to be cleaned up properly, and another db-deploy change.

[Gary Poster (gary)]

See bug 772763