Remove "wiki" and "may make your life easier" from Page change notification

[stevenwilliams]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

When a user changes a Page in a Canvas site and the "Notify users that this content has changed" option has been checked, users who are notified receive a notification reading "A page has been updated on the wiki for (course name) that may make your life easier".

This notification is misleading to users for a couple reasons:

1. Although the Pages tool is very wiki-like in nature, the tool is not labeled this way within Canvas, and users do not immediately understand the term "wiki" in the context of this notification

2. The "may make your life easier" phrase is frequently not relevant or appropriate for changes to Canvas Pages.

An improved notification could read: "A page has been updated in (course name)".

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14928 .

[tdelillo]

Also, it doesn't make much sense grammatically.

[James]

This is most likely a hold-over from when they were called Wiki Pages. Internally, within the database and few other places, they still are.

[James]

The "that may make your life easier" does sound so strange that I thought it was part of the local name for the page rather than the message. It's ran together without any punctuation, so it could have been.

I looked at the source code and found it's been worded that way since the initial commit on GitHub January 31, 2011.

I can normally try to think of some justification for the way Canvas does things. I understand why the "wiki" was there, but your #2 point has me completely baffled. Maybe an engineer put something in as a placeholder and it slipped through unnoticed for 8 years.

Anyway, this has my vote.

[tdelillo]

Do you happen to know how to find ALL the notification wording? This topic had me digging around the Community for a document that listed the text for each notification, but I didn't find anything like that. I suspect some of the other notifications are weird, too, but we've just grown accustomed to them

[James]

 @tdelillo ,

I start off with a search for the text in the source code. Although you can search from GitHub, I have my own local copy of the source code and find it easier to do from there.

Normally the American English version has the text in the source code and the other languages have a translation in the /config/locales folder. The other locales (besides English) have most of the messages in them in one place, but English is missing them in the locale file. However, they are alphabetical by the name of the file. The messages are all under "messages", but there are a LOT of other things there that are not notification messages.

Here is the updated_wiki_page section.

    updated_wiki_page: 
      email: 
        body: "A page has been updated on the wiki for %{title} that may make your life easier."
        html: 
          body: "A page has been updated on the wiki for %{title} that may make your life easier."
          link_message: "Click here to review it"
          subject: "Updated Wiki page: %{title}, %{user}"
        link_message: "You can review it here: %{link}"
        subject: "Updated Wiki Page: %{title}, %{user}"
      sms: 
        more_info: "More info at %{url}"
        updated_message: "%{title}, %{user} just updated:"
      summary: 
        subject: "Updated Wiki Page: %{title}, %{user}"
      twitter: 
        tweet: "Canvas Alert - Page Updated: %{title}, %{user}."
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Since I wanted the English version and didn't want to rely on the translated version, I ended up in /app/messages folder, which has files with names containing sms, email, email.html, twitter, and summary so you know which method they're using. This particular one was updated_wiki_page.email.erb and updated_wiki_page.email.html.erb.

I guess your life only gets easier if you receive notifications by email. SMS and Twitter users still have it rough.

[povich]

Adding to the point about the odd wording. This wording may lead one to believe that the notification has been sent to "students" or others at lower permission levels. This exacerbates the overall lack of transparency about who receives notifications and when. Beyond this the optional notification box that can be checked after a Page is edited says "Notify users that this content has changed." It is very unclear who is included in "users".

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2018-07-02) 

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas 

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2018-07-14) .

[Renee_Carney]

 @stevenwilliams  Thank You  for submitting this idea, as well as,  @tdelillo  Thank You ,  @James  Thank You , &  @povich  Thank You  for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas!