Sometimes server maintainers might like to make announcements to notify users for things like planned maintenance, scheduled downtime, data breaches, etc. Has it been considered giving chatmail server maintainers an easy way to make announcements? Simply mailing every account on the server is one option, but maybe it would be better if Delta Chat checks if an “announcements” file exists on the server and displays the announcements with a nice UI in the app?
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There was an idea to have a Provider Chat that is highlighted as official/verified.
I don’t like contacting every user of the server as a solution because this assumes that the server maintainer needs to know if the accounts are deltachat users (and this cannot be the case for servers that are not chatmail).
Instead your second solution seems better to me which would be like a news channel
I’m only talking about chatmail servers at this point because this is something where the Delta Chat developers have direct control over the development, and because for many Delta Chat users, the app is probably the only way they ever interact with the server. I assume that all accounts on a chatmail server belong to a Delta Chat user (or someone using a Delta Chat fork).
Well I think additions to chatmail should always be made with an eye toward regular servers, because if at some point the functionality starts to be too different that it no longer warrants support for conventional email servers, at that point deltachat would lose one of its special advantages, that of being ubiquitous in an already widespread infrastructure.
That’s why precisely between your two hypotheses I liked the second one better, because it could also be made to work in a conventional email server without too much distinction.
Announcements could be done via a mailing list channel, would be nice the chatmail scripts provided a command for doing such announcements
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By the way, did nine.testrun.org change automatic message deletion time to 20 days recently or was it always like that? I thought it was something different before. If there was a change, it seems like a good example of why announcement channels would be useful, keeping users up to date on policy changes.
Do I remember correctly that nine.testrun.org kept messages for twice as long before? If this was the case, then halving the time seems quite a dramatic change and I am curious what is the motivation for the policy change and when did that happen?
I thought it was 30 days before, but I’m personally not involved in that area, so I can’t tell exactly at the moment. Though when you only have one device it should be deleted much earlier (either immediately or 1 hour after fetching).
As an expansion of this idea, it’d be pretty cool to have read-only channels/chats too, that only i.e the creator can send into, whilst still allowing reactions
Kind of like Telegram channels, I guess?
Maybe you are right. I just remember thinking it was much longer than 20 days before and I am curious when the change happened and what is the reason for the policy change? Personally I think it’s better to have it a bit longer for the benefit of contacts who don’t use or don’t have instant notifications and don’t check for messages so often.
I think this idea has also been suggested before, seems like a popular idea.