How do I mute all the owls?

[Mikael Kalms]

Hi,

I'm using Plastic on several machines in parallel. I'm getting tired of muting all the *** owls on all machines. How do I do it?

Don't get me wrong, the owls seem like a great feature for people getting started with Plastic, but some people who are experienced with Plastic since before just want them gone. Several people on my team have asked me how to mute them all in one go, and I have no good answer.

Mikael

[psantosl]

Hi Mikael,

There is one thing you maybe didn't notice:

 

When the dynamic help shows up, there is always a "got it, don't show again" button that will never show this specific message back to you.

 

Can you share which are the messages that are not relevant for you?

 

I ask this because we made the help system be context sensitive, so if you are not new to Plastic, it will not show you some basic messages, but it could be that we made some mistake or didn't tune it correctly.

 

That being said: owls are not just to help newcomers. Look at this:

 

This happens when I repeatedly click refresh. It is called "frustration detection" and figures out if there something wrong going on, and helps you solve the situation.

 

It is also extremely helpful while doing merges and under many other circumstances.

 

Please share which help messages do you find irrelevant, and we'll try to improve that area 🙂

 

Thanks!

[Mikael Kalms]

I'm aware of the "Got it, don't show me again" button. I made this post because I had grown tired of muting the messages one-by-one.

My personal frustration comes from the owl system not realizing that me (one human) is using Plastic on multiple machines. When I'm updating to an Owl-enabled Plastic version on my third computer, I am not interested in reading any of the owl popups on that computer because I have already been through these once on the other two machines.

I have no hard data on which owls appear unwanted to the team here. I'll let you know if I can pinpoint any that cause frustration with my colleagues.

[Mikael Kalms]

I'm aware of the "Got it, don't show me again" button. I made this post because I had grown tired of muting the messages one-by-one.

My personal frustration comes from the owl system not realizing that me (one human) is using Plastic on multiple machines. When I'm updating to an Owl-enabled Plastic version on my third computer, I am not interested in reading any of the owl popups on that computer because I have already been through these once on the other two machines.

I have no hard data on which owls appear unwanted to the team here. I'll let you know if I can pinpoint any that cause frustration with my colleagues.

[psantosl]

Thanks Mikael!

 

We don't store owl data on the server, probably we should, to avoid these situations.

[Mikael Kalms]

Storing owl data on the server assumes that one human = one account on one server.

You are reasonably close to that with a centralized workflow where users work directly against Plastic Cloud. We also have accounts which are for a particular purpose (example: build system) rather than a particular human. The mapping is not accurate in those cases. I'm not sure how important those accounts are in the grand scheme of things.

I suspect it will be more difficult for you in distributed scenarios involving on-premise servers: Which server will a user's owl information be stored on?

 

 

I'm going to make a comparison here, between the Unreal Editor and Plastic. Like Plastic, the Unreal Editor has a couple of short tutorials, that are situational (tutorial X becomes available when entering page X).

 

4 out of 4 developers I have asked in the office, would like to mute all the owls in their Plastic clients right now.  0 out of 4 developers I have asked in the office, would like to mute all the tutorials in their Unreal Editors right now.

 

The main problem that these developers have is that the owls in Plastic are intrusive, while the tutorial indicator in Unreal Editor is not intrusive. The developers here would have been OK with the owls if they had been less in-your-face. They steal a lot of screen real-estate and interrupt your train of thought when they appear. That is why people here are annoyed with them.

 

I did not ask for this owl to appear. This is intrusive: 

I did not ask for the tutorial indicator to appear on first application launch. This is slightly intrusive, but I only need to click away the "welcome" popup once:

I did not ask for the tutorial indicator to appear on subsequent pages either. This is not intrusive:

 

 

[Mikael Kalms]

There is also ... this solution: https://github.com/Kalmalyzer/MuteThoseBloodyOwls

[solaris]

I second that there should be a way to turn off all owls with a simple checkbox somewhere.  It sounds pretty crazy to me that you don't already have it.  Going one-by-one turning them off is irritating. 

 

PS: downloading, compiling, and running some random program off the internet to do this and alter my windows keys is just as insane IMO.

[Mikael Kalms]

In recent times, the "owl" is being used to not only give tips on features, but also notify about new Plastic version releases. This increases the frequency at which people see these owl popups.

I still think it is a mistake to put these tips in people's faces. There are gentler solutions. See what Unreal Engine does (in screenshots above).

 

Here is a snippet of conversation from our internal Slack workspace. They were starting Plastic, going to do some work, and wham there's 30% of the plastic UI surface area covered by something they didn't ask for and unrelated to what they're currently thinking about. They need to go hunt for that tiny dismiss button before they can continue working effectively.

I don't think they dislike the owl and the information in itself; it's rather that it shows up un-prompted, with information that is only relevant to some of the users. Small notifications in the corner of the UI are less intrusive and allow people to take action when they think "interesting, tell me more".

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Ian Mandarini]

The owl appears VERY often, sometimes more than once a day, interrupting daily workflow.
It currently covers almost half the screen and its beeing used to tell me about minor patches.

And I couldn't find a way to get rid of them or make them less annoying.

AND
For the less experienced teamates, who are already struggling with version control concepts, having the owl clutter the screen has often made it more confusing. They often don't even notice that half of the screen is being covered by dismissable information.

This really needs to be fixed -- in the VERY LEAST, allow us to mute all owl notifications.