Subscriptions

[jasminechau2]

I want to have users subscribe to a conversation (possibly a user profile) to follow the activity and receive notifications when messages are sent/ user makes a conversation. I haven't really thought about what the code for this would look like.

[yelsayd]

Can we discuss what the use case for this feature is? Subscribing to a conversation to me implies that the conversation both 1) is publicly accessible, or at least accessible to this user, and 2) does not send notifications to this user by default. Do you agree? It seems to me if this is the case, we need to have one of these features as a precedent:

• Public, group chat like, conversations. Maybe like a chatroom, where a user creates it and anyone can join/subscribe. This implies a place to find these rooms too.
• The ability to mute conversations. This would mean the user can unmute, which is equivalent to subscribe.

If you have a different use case where we can employ the subscriptions feature let's discuss it here. :)

[jasminechau2]

I was thinking along the lines of this. I was under the impression that we had both the ability to have private and public conversations, so a user could subscribe/unmute a conversation they are interested in as long as the conversation was public. I don't think all users should see all activity present on app through the notifications, that is how it is currently set up.

[yelsayd]

Ah, I forgot we already added the ability to make a conversation private/public. I guess this makes sense then! There's probably no need to look at the mute/unmute feature for now, this can be future work.

[jasminechau2]

Would it be useful for people to see their subscriptions? Also, I was thinking that this information should be stored with the user class. Would it be better to use something other than a list to store the data?

[yelsayd]

I think that would be useful. Perhaps we can have two tabs on the notifications page, one to show you the actual notifications, one to see a list of chats you're subscribed to/watching. Github does that on the notifications page as well.

[jasminechau2]

I was thinking along the lines of that as well