@-mention should not consider groups with "disabled group mentions"

Release notes

@all should not consider groups with "disabled group mentions".

  • using @all mentions in issue comments or merge requests is kind-of handy when you use a dedicated group where you have control over the users in that group
  • however things get complicated if you add groups to the members of your project (Project information -> Members -> invite a group)
    • adding groups to your project is handy if you prefer to share your code to a broader audience (especially in corporate/internal scenarios)
    • but @all mentions might cause unnecessary email flood for many participants (other roles) not willing to code (merge request) or work on issues

Problem to solve

  1. Start a small project and add a few members (e.g. 20 people)
  2. Start collaboration with issues and merge requests
  3. Notify all members of the project in an issue comment e.g. @all someone else have a opinion about this?
  4. Broaden the audience of your project by adding a "large" group (e.g. all-users; 600 members)
    • the group all-users is just a users collection (no sub projects or sub groups)
    • Disable group mentions is checked
  5. Change the assignee of an issue with an @all-comment (step 3) and observe that all users (here: 620 instead of 20) will receive an update about this issue
    • ⚠️ this is unintended for 2 reasons
      1. after adding a group to the project the users for @all is increased "silently"
      1. since the group all-users has disabled any group mentions it is not possible to mention @all-users but implicitly with @all.

Proposal

The users of a group with "Disable group mentions"-checked should not be taken into account for @all-mentions.

Intended users

Depending on the design of your groups certain Personas might be interested in @all-mentions and certain not.

e.g. Personas who are probably not working "all day long" in gitlab and probably not interested in @all-mentions:

e.g. Personas working more with issues and merge_requests might have more interest in @all-mentions:

Feature Usage Metrics

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