Notifications - Implementing custom group notifications

[Johann-Snapp]

As said in RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#1315, @geekgonecrazy doesn't like when people notify @ALL, and he's not the only one.
Plus, it's comfortable when you can call @frontends, @backends, @lawyers, ect.

This issue is not about asking a feature, it's more about how to implement it correctly.
So, let's go !

• In order to configure it, we'll need to persist custom mentions.
• As admins could configure it, what happens in case of conflict between a username & a mention-group name ?
• We'll need to update the mentions autocomplete popup
• What happens when we click on the mentionned group ? Does it open the right panel with user list ? How does it work for @ALL ? Does it shows the channel's user list or does it send data to the panel ?
• In which admin section do we put it ? Users ? Channels ? Message ? New section ?
• Maybe we can implement the confirmation popup when notifying many people: Settings for confirmation for using @all notification on messages Rocket.Chat#909
• Maybe we could add aliases to mentions so that we search by name or alias.

Did I forget something ? Is there someone motivated to help me working on it ? Is there someone already working on it ?

[damienmollard]

+1

[Johann-Snapp]

Found this: RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#1564

[engelgabriel]

This will need to tied up with the ROLES, so you could mention @rolename

[Johann-Snapp]

If we do this, we have to setup a exclude list in order to not have things like @bot

[engelgabriel]

@channel will send a notification to all team members in the channel where you post the message.

@everyone notifies every member of your team. This command can only be used in the team-wide channel (usually called #general).

Both notifications will be sent to all team members in the channel whether they are active, away or offline.

@here is best for sending announcements relevant only to team members that are currently working or available.

[marceloschmidt]

I'll add a reference to RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#2135 as this is an important guide if we are going on that direction.

[nemolivier]

On this I would like :

• @ChanS : notify all chans (only for admin, when reboot, update, etc.)
• @admins / @modos : add an attention sign in front of the chan to notify a problem in chan (someone trolling, need for moderation, etc.)

[engelgabriel]

See for mor discussion on this feature
RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#1315
RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#2135

[CodeWarriorr]

+1
It would be awesome if I could call role/group member !

As admins could configure it, what happens in case of conflict between a username & a mention-group name ?

Mentions to groups or roles could be prefixed by special char e.g. @@testers

[jgtoriginal]

@engelgabriel Actually I'd go for dynamic tags, for as many roles an admin creates on his instance.
It would be something like, getting a list of available roles on a room, and create the specific tags for that room.
Not sure how the tag command works though.

[slyk]

+1 need this feature.

I think admin need to create mention groups. And If he sees conflict with username, he will deal with this manually by changing user name. With good naming rules sole user wouldn't name himself using plural name ('-s' end), so conflicts will be rare.

NOT roles. Roles seems to be easy way to group people. But roles here is like system way of managing permissions. Group of users could have different chat permissions and still I want to mention them all. Connecting roles and mention groups will add unneeded restrictions.

"Users" menu is good place to configure mention groups. From there you see usernames and system can show you conflicts. It could be just sidebar button that opens sidebar with groups list. Don't think someone will have too much groups to create separate page for them.

P.S. the easy way for small teams create sort of inline alias, that will replace group name to list of usernames. Example: you wrote
"@managers"
and in chat it appeared as
"@manager1 @manager2 @manager3"

[ginnj-gilmore]

+1 above solutions seem viable and it would be a great feature to have!

[mxmo0rhuhn]

We would love this feature!

[jgtoriginal]

After giving it a thought, it would be actually great to give users the option to tag themselves as 'developers', 'lawyers', etc. And also give admins the right to tag people from the dashboard.
This would be only an extra attribute on the user object.
From which then we can write a hook to pick tags part of the mentions functionality.
How does that sound to you all?

[mxmo0rhuhn]

Tagging sounds like a good idea - as always LDAP integration would be awesome.
For our organisation it would be better if the mentions would not be expanded. Imagine a team with 20 people or so would be expanded like:
@devs could you have a look?
@dev1 @dev2 @dev3 ... @dev20 could you have a look?

[KrystalMoore16]

+1 please implement this feature!

…

On Jan 9, 2018, at 5:51 PM, mxmo0rhuhn ***@***.***> wrote: Tagging sounds like a good idea - as always LDAP integration would be awesome. For our organisation it would be better if the mentions would not be expanded. Imagine a team with 20 people or so would be expanded like: @devs could you have a look? @dev1 @Dev2 @Dev3 ... @dev20 could you have a look? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[jgtoriginal]

after having a look at the code behind this, I think it would be highly advantageous to give owners and admins the option to turn off the @all feature on a channel basis.
So say you go to #support and want to call everybody's attention, but your question is not as important to every single user there, admins would have the possibility to disallow @all and only allow @here or @some-random-team

[KrystalMoore16]

Any update? Thanks!

[vynmera]

Perhaps we could use a different character, for example +admin? They can be role-based, but you can turn mentionability on and off per role. We can add an extra field to the role settings to how they should be displayed in chat, so that the "Admin" role will be displayed as +Admins.

[BanHammor]

I would really like this feature implemented, +1

[bwesemann-cxp]

+1 would love this feature. @all is getting annoying in large chats

[Wirone]

In our organization we have channels per team (public, so everybody can ask each team about something), sometimes per project (members are team that maintain project + invited people from business etc.). Most of the time there is some part of members that is responsible for the channel (let's call it "owners") and rest of members are guests. This feature would give us ability to call such "owners" without need to notify all channel members.

For example, there is channel for Jira/Confluence admins. Everybody can ask there something, but using @all or @here would notify too many people as we want to only draw Jira team's attention. Currently we can't easily mention group of users and mentioning each one is too cumbersome.

[FaizanZahid]

i would love to have this feature +1

[williamhilliard]

+1

[dta5003]

Pretty please +1

This is a feature we're missing in the transition from Slack.

[slyk]

Maybe someone will add some more coins to bounty? And then comunity and devs will understand how this important?)

Waiting it for a long time.

[gpoudrel]

Great feature it would be.

[Crayder]

whether the group notifies offline people (like @all vs @here)

Thank you!

[Wirone]

@SeaLife but with granular permissions in RocketChat it could be possible to create role for managing notification groups and allow users to do it, so Admins won't be bothered that much. I don't think notification groups configuration should go to channel's settings panel.

[SeaLife]

@Wirone okay, we should probably evaluate this first...
Its probably not that good if everyone can create global notification groups...
But we'll see :)

Im looking forward to this :)

[maciek134]

This should only take a day or two more, I re-did the admin side of things since it was a bit crammed in a side panel when editing groups.

[J0kerFace]

What's the status here?

[maciek134]

Got overwhelmed with other work, I hope to have this finished by the end of the week.

EDIT: nothing came of the plans, but I'm taking the rest of the month off Thursday, so I will have plenty of time ;p

[sdsznsk]

@maciek134 Any updates on this? It would help a lot

[maciek134]

@Teqashi I'm almost done, just didn't have time to wrap it up and send a PR. I'll try to do it in the evening.

[fdellwing]

We just had a meeting, discussing to supersede RC because not custom mentions are possible. Really looking forward into testing this!

[maciek134]

@fdellwing I'm pushing it today. Btw what were you thinking of replacing RC with? I'm not aware of any that implement custom mentions atm. Oh, Slack has it as "user groups"

[fdellwing]

That's correct, we looked at Slack and Teams. But we would like to further use RC, because we really like the discussions.

[J0kerFace]

HipChat have it too. But that's been discontinued.

[compuguy]

@maciek134 When you get a chance, can you please link to your pull request when you open it?

[maciek134]

GitHub links PRs with issue mentions automatically ;p It's pretty much done, but user self-assignment is missing along with a few translations.

[compuguy]

I didn't know that @maciek134. I understand that this is a WIP. It will be worth the wait though.

[thesystemninjaneer]

Not sure if this is the right Issue to request this but can the functionality to message using @owner and @leader of public and private channels be added as well?

We have CI/CD pipelines automatically notifying channels of pass/fail build status and the owner/leader of the channel cares about the build status the most. Support for those native roles saves us a few extra steps of having to setup a group and and/remove members over time as employees change their roles or move on in their career while the channel Leader/Owner consistently remains up to date.

[Crayder]

@thesystemninjaneer That's basically what this whole issue is suggesting, custom groups and custom notification filtering for those groups. With this implementation you'll be able to make those groups and assign people to them like normal except now you will be able to only notify active people and stuff. For being the owner of this particular group you'd just create a group for the channel in question called "owner" and assign yourself to it.

[thesystemninjaneer]

@Crayder I’m tracking the Group approach coming with this the feature in this isse but was asking for a way to notify the person assigned a particular channel role (such as owner or leader) without the extra steps of creating and maintaining a custom group. Is that something easily achievable?

[maciek134]

@thesystemninjaneer easily achievable - yes, but I don't think this is in the scope of this issue / PR.

[Shaverdoff]

any progress of that? or this develop-issues need some donate?

[maciek134]

@Shaverdoff I may finally have some time to finish this one, I'll try to push fixes this week.

[sviat9440]

Any news ?

[julianeisel]

Let me second this! Such a feature would be very helpful for us at Blender (blender.chat), and allow us to move more conversations to public channels.

There's lots of activity in our public channels, if I want to notify a specific team (say the core UI-team) it's a hassle to do in public channels. Hence some teams end up using lower-traffic, private team channels more, which is against our own transparency-principles.
We use read-only channels in some instances, but they further fragment public communication which is an issue already.

[sviat9440]

@maciek134 are you have problem? 2021 still waiting (
This is very important feature for us...

[vinogradovia]

Any news ?

[fdellwing]

RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#16311 (comment) ff

We are now switching to teams. They at least are not putting essential features behind a paywall. Without the option to buy it separately.

[vinogradovia]

thx, strange that I did not find this functionality in the price (licence comparison)

[fdellwing]

https://docs.rocket.chat/guides/user-guides/rooms/teams/teams-enterprise-edition

It's not even included in the middle price option, only in the highest price that they do not even communicate openly.