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A few weeks ago the Yellow Squad made another change to increase the relevance of the email you get from Launchpad by eliminating some noisy ones.  A while back, Matthew Paul Thomas noticed that a change to a bug that was subsequently reverted could be deemed a mistake and was an action no one really needed to know about.  As is his habit, mpt opened a bug (164196) with the suggestion that corrected actions not generate email.

So if Alice is assigned to a bug by mistake and then unassigned within five minutes no email is generated.  Likewise, if a tag is added but then quickly removed the action does not cause any email to be sent.

Note that avoiding email requires that the action be undone, not just fixed.  By that I mean the bug must be returned to the original state to be recognized as an undoing.  So if you assign Alice to a bug by mistake and then change that assignment to Bob then the action will not be seen as a mistake.  Email will be sent notifying about both assignee changes to Alice and then to Bob.

Thanks to Gary and Danilo for the fix.

Launchpad’s bug mail can be a bit chatty sometimes as I’m sure you’ve noticed.  This cycle the Yellow Squad is working to give you more control about the bug mail Launchpad sends to you.

One problem that we’ve known about for a really long time was reported as bug 548 and has recently been closed thanks to the effort of  Данило Шеган and Gary Poster.  Their fix allows you to globally specify whether you want to receive email about actions you did.

Most people probably do not need to be reminded of something they did a few minutes ago and will want to turn off those emails.  But, since this is new functionality we’ve preserved the old behavior unless a user changes the setting.  If you do nothing you’ll continue to get email about actions you instigate on bugs.

Opting out of those messages is easy.  Simply go to https://launchpad.net/people/+me/+edit and uncheck the box as shown below by the big red arrow.

As mentioned, this is just the first of many features and refinements that we’re working on to help you customize the stream of bug mail coming from Launchpad to suit your needs.

Polls were introduced to Launchpad as a way for teams to conduct internal surveys.  Unfortunately the user interface and feature set were always problematic.  The feature never really caught on and wasn’t used much (a little over 500 polls since 2006).

A discussion[1] on the Launchpad Users mailing list saw a consensus agree that polls in their current state were not a viable feature and they should be removed rather than being fixed.  As part of the December Launchpad Bug Jam I’ve taken on the task of removing them from the site.

Currently there are only four polls that are underway and the owners of the teams responsible for those polls will be notified that the feature is being removed.  The data from all existing polls will be saved and made available to the teams at PollFeatureRemoved.

[1] https://lists.launchpad.net/launchpad-users/msg06098.html