Opt-out of notifications for a Val

[Ross-Hunter]

I would like to be able to opt-out of the email notifications about errors per val. While I'm actively writing it, they are just noise, and I can imagine a situation where you have a val that throws errors that you want to show up in the error log, but you don't need an email notification about.

[stevekrouse]

Is the real feature request that you would like to not receive error emails as you are actively developing the val and logged into the website? ie we should detect your presence through some heuristic and suppress notifications on those vals during that time

I think notifications in other productivity tools work this way, a la Google Docs notifications

[Ross-Hunter]

Thinking about this more, I was actually surprised to receive any email notification at all. It seems antithetical to the really lightweight nature of creating new vals. I would assume you'd be more likely to want to opt-in to email notifications only after establishing that this val is working and is a val you care about.

I could also just have a val that I don't want to invest in writing good error handling -- and I don't want to be notified every time it is hit without a required value or something along those lines.

This may be a separate feature request, but I may be more interested in notifications if the error rate is high for a given period.

[stevekrouse]

Good notes! Thanks!

[neverstew]

Idea for pushing this into user space and getting something shipped quickly...

Allow notification emails to go a to specific email val on your account. This val deals with forwarding (or not) to the primary email address (or anywhere else for that matter).

A stock val in the docs with a black/white list implementation would be great to get people bootstrapped.

[stevekrouse]

I wonder if you could change your primary email address on your Val Town account to a val's email address! That would put this problem in userspace!

[stevekrouse]

We just pushed a fix that will stop sending error notifications for vals while you're editing them. Hope this solves the main pain-point here. Let's all report back in a bit after playing with it if we think we can close (or rename) this ticket or if the issue is still present

[robinsloan]

Just to toss in a random experience: I received a val error email the other day related to a val that has run several hundred times, very much in "set it and forget it" mode, alerting me to an edge case I hadn't anticipated -- and it was really valuable! Turns out, for me (and my style of programming) that kind of proactive -- indeed unsolicited -- alert is a real boon.

I like the way it gives the val itself a bit of agency. "Uh, hey, boss…"