[briar-devel] Forum invitations

[Michael R. <mi...@br...>]

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Hi all,

One of the biggest issues uncovered by the recent focus group testing
was that sharing forums was confusing. When a user subscribed to a
forum that had been shared with her, she had to share the forum with
at least one contact who'd shared it with her - otherwise she wouldn't
receive any posts, and nobody else would receive her posts.

In retrospect that was obviously a terrible design. I'd been thinking
about the underlying mechanism for so long I'd forgotten how
counter-intuitive it was.

During the remaining tests we worked around the problem by
automatically sharing forums with all contacts. That removed the
confusion around sharing, but it's not an acceptable long-term
solution because it doesn't give people any privacy regarding their
forum subscriptions. So we need to rethink how this feature works and
how it's presented.

In the focus group conversations about forums, people frequently used
the word 'invite' rather than 'share', even though 'share' was used in
the UI. I believe that's a clue about mental models. People also asked
for the ability to invite contacts to forums with a personal message,
which they could use to explain the reason for the invitation, etc.

I think we can fit the underlying mechanism to a mental model based on
invitations without too much difficulty. The current protocol is
symmetrical: A sends a subscription update to B, B sends a
subscription update to A. An invitation-based protocol would be
asymmetrical: A sends an invitation to B, B sends an invitation
response to A. There's almost no difference on the wire, except that
we add a personal message field to the invitation. But semantically
the two protocols are quite different: subscribing to a forum doesn't
imply anything about who should be able to see your subscription, but
accepting an invitation implies (to my mind) that the person who
invited you should know that you've accepted. So instead of two
separate actions - subscribe and share - the recipient just takes one
action - accept invitation - and the forum works, with no privacy
violation.

However, there's one snag I'm concerned about: what happens when
someone receives an invitation to a forum they already subscribe to?
How are people likely to react to such invitations? Are they likely to
send such invitations? Lateral connections between subscribers are
good for the robustness and performance of the forum, but it's
counter-intuitive to invite someone to a forum you know they already
subscribe to. Can we find a way to fit lateral connections into this
mental model?

Cheers,
Michael
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