Tales From The Geek Side

I’m a somewhat casual user and administrator of the Mantis bug tracker.  Mantis is an issue tracking system written in PHP that includes a SOAP interface.  You don’t have to use the SOAP interface as it comes with a suitable HTML user interface.

Lately I’ve been loaded with more responsibility at work.   To keep track of the projects that I’m working and what other people are helping me with I’ve started using Mantis much more heavily.  One thing that started to frustrate me is that I wouldn’t know when people submitted new issues unless they were assigned to me.

There’s a GUI for managing email notifications that you can use at the global level or override on a per-project basis.  I enabled email notifications for new issues for “developers, managers, and administrators.”  Then I created a dummy issue as a test.  I was shocked to see that Mantis sent emails to ALL developers, managers, and administrators in my entire company!  I expected these messages to be sent to just the developers, managers, and administrators assigned to the project.

After much googling I finally found the answer.  If a project is public it will send those emails to everyone because everyone has visibility into those issues.  I had set all projects to public because I leave things open by default.  I prefer to promote communication in my company.  This also explains the (at the time) perplexing user interface for managing a project that listed everyone as a member of the project but only those that were truly project members had “remove” buttons.

So if you want to send out notifications of new issues to all members of a project make sure your project is private.