Found at de.wp: it seems that users without the Homepage being enabled get a notification when their mentor changes. It leads to some confusion.
Only users who have turned the Homepage on should get a notification when their mentor changes. Other users should not be informed about this kind of change as they have no clue of mentoring.
Users who are in a control group regarding mentoring (no access to the mentorship module) shouldn't get this notification either.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T330494 [EPIC] Growth: Special:ClaimMentee improvements | |||
| Resolved | Urbanecm_WMF | T301981 Only users who have turned the Homepage on should get a notification when their mentor changes |
This seems to becoming more of a problem as the process to bulk reassign mentees for retired mentors becomes available. A retirement may trigger hundreders or more mentess changes, but notifying the ones that aren't using the feature is notification noise.
Thanks for the ping @Xaosflux! I agree this has became very important to fix, although for a slightly different reason than originally expected. During the year of this task's existence, we decided to implement T327206: Not possible to claim manually a newcomer which does not have the mentorship module previously activated. This means if someone's mentor is changed, GrowthExperiments enables mentorship module for them, if it was enabled. We did this change, to help mentors claim anyone (even if the claimed newcomer previously didn't have mentorship access). In other words, the notification now (in a way) informs the newcomer they now have mentorship access. It is still going to be very confusing, though.
I don't think this was the intention of implementing T327206. Each time a mentor retires, it brings a lot of new mentees to the system, which is potentially dangerous (it can overwhelm existing mentors). Even though the majority of mentees which are introduced in this way (through mentor resignations) are inactive, this should be fixed ASAP regardless.
To resolve this problem, I think we should:
For the reasons described above, boldly setting priority to High and moving to sprint.
Change 890195 had a related patch set uploaded (by Urbanecm; author: Urbanecm):
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Do not enable mentorship when mentor is changed in bulk
"Ensure mass-reassignment triggered by GrowthExperiments as part of mentor resignation don't affect mentees with mentorship enabled." - shouldn't this not affect mentees WITHOUT mentorship enabled? If someone isn't opt-ed in somehow, although they technically have a mentor assigned they don't know and don't care - they probably shouldn't be force enabled in and notified??
That was a typo, corrected. We'd still change the mentor in the database (in case their access to mentorship is enabled in some way), but we won't announce it, or enroll them into mentorship (that will only happen when someone uses Special:ClaimMentee manually).
Change 890195 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] Do not enable mentorship when mentor is changed in bulk
Change 891808 had a related patch set uploaded (by Urbanecm; author: Urbanecm):
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] ChangeMentor: Do not notify users with no homepage access
On second sight, the associated patch actually doesn't help with the reported issue, but with a relevant issue that was not reported. The patch helps when the newcomer doesn't have access to mentorship (enwiki, eswiki), but doesn't help when the newcomer doesn't have access to Homepage (dewiki, where there's a 20% control group).
Uploaded a fix for the second part of the issue and moving back to Code Review.
@Urbanecm_WMF isn't it possible for users to use mentorship via the help panel, without access to Special:Homepage? (At least, that is what I see if I disable my access to Special:Homepage but leave help panel enabled.)
Change 891808 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] ChangeMentor: Do not notify users with no access to mentorship
Checked in betalabs - assuming that "change of a mentor" happens when a mentor quits and mentees get re-assigned. Works as expected: the test users (one user never had mentorship module (a control group), another opted-out from mentorship) did not receive notifications. One interesting small thing - re-assigning of a user in control group was recorded in Special: Log, but re-assogning a mentee who opted out from Mentorship was not. Probably both users should not have the records in Special:Log (this is super minor though).
However, Special:ClaimMentee action
Filed as T335462