529177 - notifycompat funny business

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Administration, defect, P1)

Description

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

We added the notifycompat flag for users to be able to opt-out of compatibility emails in their preferences. By default, the field is set to 1, meaning the user should receive compat emails unless they opt-out.

This is the current breakdown of this flag:
mysql> select notifycompat, count(*) from users group by notifycompat;
+--------------+----------+
| notifycompat | count(*) |
+--------------+----------+
|            0 |    46800 | 
|            1 |  4267464 | 
+--------------+----------+
2 rows in set (21.45 sec)

There's no way that many people have opted out, and there are other suspicious things.

mysql> select created from users where notifycompat = 0 limit 100;

starts listing all accounts from the day we imported into remora as having opted out.

mysql> select created from users where notifycompat = 0 and created > '2009' limit 100;

says that a ton of sequential accounts at the beginning of this year opted out.

Can someone take a look and figure out what's going on? This is blocking our sending additional compatibility emails, which I was planning to do today.

Comment 1

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

Okay, so it's impossible that 46,800 people have opted out of this as we only show this preference to developers, and we don't have that many developers.

I think our plan will be to reset the flag for everyone, and then in the email I send today, have a link to change the pref if people want to opt out. It sucks that we have to do this, but the pref isn't helping in its current state.

I just wish I knew how it got to be this way.

Comment 2

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Okay, so it's impossible that 46,800 people have opted out of this as we only
> show this preference to developers, and we don't have that many developers.
> 
> I think our plan will be to reset the flag for everyone, and then in the email
> I send today, have a link to change the pref if people want to opt out. It
> sucks that we have to do this, but the pref isn't helping in its current state.
> 
> I just wish I knew how it got to be this way.

Users can't change the preference right now in production (bug 529325).  If you need them to change it we'll have to push the patch out early.

Comment 3

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

This is difficult for me to test since I don't have access to the preview database, but I managed to get a test account to spontaneously set itself notifycompat=0 by deselecting "Hide email address" and then saving my profile, using current trunk.

Comment 4

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

Thanks sancus. Wil, QA, can you see if you can reproduce this? If so, we need to get this fixed today as we're under a lot of pressure to send out the emails by tonight.

Comment 5

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> This is difficult for me to test since I don't have access to the preview
> database, but I managed to get a test account to spontaneously set itself
> notifycompat=0 by deselecting "Hide email address" and then saving my profile,
> using current trunk.

I can't reproduce this

Comment 6

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

Attachment: notifycompat serious business v1

Right now, if there's no notifycompat/notifyevents keys in the data array, this sets that data to '', an empty string. This ends up being converted to 0. If you don't have those array keys, that means you're not a developer, so this should always default to 1, not ''.

Comment 7

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

r56261

Comment 8

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

Full steps to reproduce, btw, were:
1) Make a new account(non-developer account that has NEVER edited profile works too)
2) Edit your profile
3) Make any change, save the profile
4) Check the database to see that notifycompat got flipped to 0.