Tech Forum

I recently created a calendar, and added some members with the View and Edit permission. When I informed them that the calendar had been created, none of them could find it. We figured out that they hadn't subscribed to the calendars. I suggest that we change the default behavior of the subscription value to "Subscribed" for a member that has been made an Editor of said calendar. That seems like the intuitive behavior to me.

hyrumw wrote:I recently created a calendar, and added some members with the View and Edit permission. When I informed them that the calendar had been created, none of them could find it. We figured out that they hadn't subscribed to the calendars. I suggest that we change the default behavior of the subscription value to "Subscribed" for a member that has been made an Editor of said calendar. That seems like the intuitive behavior to me.

Some people might balk at that suggestion because they think that if people choose to turn off auto-subscriptions, then someone else should not be able to take action that forces them to be subscribed to a calendar without them consciously making that choice.

But personally, I like the idea. It's fairly rare that someone is explicitly added as an editor, and when it happens, they get an email. That email message could note that they have been automatically subscribed. So if they really don't like being automatically subscribed, they will have been notified, and can unsubscribe if they'd like (but that has to be a pretty rare use case when they were just added as an editor). Making this change will eliminate quite a bit of confusion, while removing only a tiny amount of agency.

aebrown wrote:It's fairly rare that someone is explicitly added as an editor, and when it happens, they get an email. That email message could note that they have been automatically subscribed. So if they really don't like being automatically subscribed, they will have been notified, and can unsubscribe if they'd like (but that has to be a pretty rare use case when they were just added as an editor). Making this change will eliminate quite a bit of confusion, while removing only a tiny amount of agency.

More or less what I was thinking. But I don't see how it removes any agency. If they get an email about a calendar to which they have been made an editor and auto-subscribed to, they still have the agency to unsubscribe. As you have correctly pointed out, this would be the rare exception. This is a far better scenario than the member who has never attended the training on the calendars, doesn't know to subscribe, and gets an email about a calendar that he can't see and therefore never uses!

As a software developer myself, two of my goals when developing are to minimize clicks by the user, and make the application intuitive (i.e. less confusing). This suggestion accomplishes both. It's a no-brainer.

hyrumw wrote:But I don't see how it removes any agency.

Maybe agency wasn't the right word. But if I unsubscribe from a mailing list, I'm going to be annoyed if that mailing list sends me email, even if they have great intentions and know it's for my own good. Similarly, if I have told the Calendar system that I do not want to be auto-subscribed to any calendars, it's not exactly kosher for the system to auto-subscribe me contrary to my expressed preference, just because it knows it's for my own good.

But that's a minor point -- as I said, I agree with the conclusion that it is still a good choice to auto-subscribe new editors in this case.