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Redmine and Email Notifications

Hi All,

Just wanted to share my recent Redmine bug tracking experience. I wanted to find out why I was no longer receiving email notifications when a new blog post was posted (which I used to get, for Core I). So I created an account on Redmine in order to report a bug. Here is what I told them:

Hi – I’m having trouble with email notifications. I used to receive email notifications when a new blog post was posted to a blog I’m a member of, but no longer do, even though my email subscription (within the Group settings) is set to “All Email.” I do receive notifications for the following: 1) updates to a document in the blog’s group; 2) comment posted to my own blog post. Is it possible to still get notified when a new post has been added? Thanks!

Almost immediately, I was notified that the status changed from “New” to “Assigned,” and who it was assigned to. Within a day, I got a personal email from a Community Facilitator from the Commons explaining the issue behind notifications (“group blog posts are not included in the group email notification settings,”) and several solutions for activating email notifications (2 plug ins which Michael has installed and are described below).

Several more Redmine emails then appeared – the first explaining that I was sent an email with an explanation and solutions; then another saying the case was resolved, then a follow up email from Commons with yet another solution (Google’s Feedburner), and then a query to close the case.
  • To subscribe to blog post notifications: Click on “Subscribe2” which is under “Tools” in the Dashboard — and you can configure how often notifications are sent to you. Here’s the link to the plug in if you’re interested.
  • To subscribe to comment notifications: When you’re posting a comment, at the bottom of the comment box there’s a checkbox that says: Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. And here’s the link to this plug in.
To be honest, I was at first reluctant to report a bug…I think for fear it was user error, that I could be wasting people’s time, and because I had to create an account, it meant it wasn’t anonymous. But I looked through their issues archives and saw a few similar issues and figured why not, it would be nice to be notified of new posts and comments. I was certainly impressed by the very fast turnaround, the efficiency of the communication, and this feeling that the Commons community is really all about collaboration, as they welcome all to submit bugs (which is a very simple and user-friendly process) in order to contribute to improving the Commons. Also, I appreciated the transparency of the Redmine system and how anyone can go in (without logging in) and see which bugs are being worked on, which have been closed, how the process happens, and who all is involved in the process. All in all, pretty neat.

Posted in After Class Discussion.

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