Send email notification for each comment/review during Call for Abstracts

glunardi · July 9, 2019, 8:21pm

This is our second year using Indico for our conference. We are hosting to concurrent conferences this year.

The site is mostly public: https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/event/4/

Our community tends to be very email driven.

While there is no way via the admin UI, would there be an easy to make Indico issue an email notification every time a comment is posted or a review is issued. In our case the email should go out to the contributors, reviewers, conveners and judges

I would be very thankful if someone could point me in the right direction before I have to spend time figuring it all out on my own.

Many thanks in advance,
-Guy (on behalf of the LPC planning committee)

pferreir · July 10, 2019, 7:47am

I guess would would like to add additional checkboxes next to “a reviewer leaves a review” (plus an additional line for “leaves a comment”)?

I just don’t understand why this would be relevant for contributors, since normally they are not entitled to see the actual reviews, only the outcome decided by the judge.

I think you are probably looking for this:

github.com

indico/indico/blob/97fa3108caedbb222a7399e02496254dc1ebba1b/indico/modules/events/papers/notifications.py

# This file is part of Indico.
# Copyright (C) 2002 - 2019 CERN
#
# Indico is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the MIT License; see the
# LICENSE file for more details.

from __future__ import unicode_literals

from flask import session

from indico.core.notifications import make_email, send_email
from indico.modules.events.papers.settings import PaperReviewingRole, paper_reviewing_settings
from indico.web.flask.templating import get_template_module


def notify_paper_revision_submission(revision):
    event = revision.paper.event
    roles_to_notify = paper_reviewing_settings.get(event, 'notify_on_paper_submission')
    if PaperReviewingRole.judge in roles_to_notify:

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The available settings are defined here:

github.com

indico/indico/blob/97fa3108caedbb222a7399e02496254dc1ebba1b/indico/modules/events/papers/settings.py

# This file is part of Indico.
# Copyright (C) 2002 - 2019 CERN
#
# Indico is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the MIT License; see the
# LICENSE file for more details.

from __future__ import unicode_literals

from indico.core.settings.converters import DatetimeConverter, SettingConverter
from indico.modules.events.papers.models.reviews import PaperReviewType
from indico.modules.events.settings import EventSettingsProxy
from indico.util.i18n import _
from indico.util.struct.enum import RichIntEnum


class PaperReviewingRole(RichIntEnum):
    __titles__ = [None, _('Judge'), _('Layout Reviewer'), _('Content Reviewer')]
    __acl_permissions__ = [None, 'paper_judge', 'paper_layout_reviewer', 'paper_content_reviewer']
    __review_types__ = [None, None, PaperReviewType.layout, PaperReviewType.content]

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It would be nice to understand your use case a little better, however, and if there is some way to support it through additional configuration options, we could even consider merging it into the core (if you’re interested of course).

glunardi · July 10, 2019, 8:21am

Thank you so much for your reply.

We try to be as open and transparent as possible about our talk and topic submissions. In the past, all submissions were public and visible by all.

As open source software communities, our attendees are quite used to carry out most of their conversations via email (primarily mailing lists). So moving these conversations into the Indico comments and review interface as removed that connection with emails.

Being able to send a notification to at least our reviewers, there are dozens of them, would be great.

Our conference is organized as a collection of microconferences, which in the Call for Abstracts are represented as Tracks in the Indico programme for that event.

Am I to understand that the Call for Abstracts uses the papers objects as well? I was under the impression that it was abstracts.

Best regards,
Guy

glunardi · July 10, 2019, 9:55am

[Traveling (just landed in Frankfurt, on a train now)]

I was able to login to our test Indico instance and I can see that UI in the Call for Papers.

This is what we would love to be able to use for the Call for Abstracts, and adding the ability to send a notification when a comment is added.

pferreir · July 10, 2019, 10:49am

OK, I assumed you were using the Call for Papers. Indeed, that part is lacking in the Call for Abstracts.
The Call for Abstracts module handles e-mails through the “Notifications” panel, which lets you set rules that react to events (e.g. an abstract being accepted/rejected). I see two options:

Adding additional “Commented” and “Reviewed” conditions, which could then be used in customizable rules;
Adding a separate interface as is the case with the Call for Papers;

I’m kind of torn between the two options, other opinions are welcome. One of the things that is missing in notification templates is the capability to decide who gets the message. OTOH a separate configuration panel might be confusing from the UX point of view.

glunardi · July 10, 2019, 11:15am

The Ruleset UI is quite usable also. We are using it to issue notification emails today.

It was not obvious to me how I would go about triggering a condition when a comment is added.

Both approach would work fine with us. I suppose that if conditions are easy to implement, adding an option in the ruleset dropdown box would have less impact. Keeping the ability to customize the email title and body (with placeholders) would be great.

mvidalga · July 10, 2019, 1:20pm

I’m more inclined towards the second option, IMHO having another interface can be really confusing for the users. It’d be an optional rule to add if needed that only notifies people that are allowed to see the comment/review and can always be disabled if it’s too spammy.