Feature request: Suggestion improvements (whitelisting, digests, reminders)

Feedback
13

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I’m going to mark this topic as solved, because the team has, at multiple times, hinted that they’re aware of the various issues surrounding suggestions (including the email problem) and are actively working towards a solution.
However, I’d like to keep the discussion going by sharing more aspects of the problem as well as my current workaround.

Additional aspects

Since this topic was created I’ve also raised issues regarding a lack of email branding and notifcations options. There are no UI hints either (no badges or highlights on the suggestion link, no entries in the activity feed), which means: Once you opt out of suggestion mails you essentially go blind.
It would be interesting to see if the number of open suggestions is larger on average for active users that have unsubscribed.

Strategies

I’ve taken up @jrus’ and @bgchen’ advice and republished the forks. Both the intention and changes must be easy to spot, so I’ve come up with the following process:

I’ve created a public Suggestions collection that acts as label and filter. The steps for each fork are:

  1. Open the suggestion’s compare view in a new tab.
    We’ll need the COMPARE_URL and SUGGESTION_TITLE.
  2. Open the original notebook in a new tab.
    We’ll need the NOTEBOOK_SLUG later on.
  3. Edit the fork, and inject the following code into a new cell before the first cell (replacing the all-caps placeholders):
    html`<h1 style=display:none>suggestions:NOTEBOOK_SLUG</h1>
<a href="COMPARE_URL"><code>SUGGESTION_TITLE`
    This will prevent the fork from polluting our own slug namespace and provide a direct diff link and change description. It also provides a commentary that can be skipped easily by the original author should they still wish to merge.
  4. Add the fork to your Suggestions collection and publish.
    Note that published changes will alter the suggestion. Warning: Don’t unpublish, or you’ll have to restore and reshare the original changes!
  5. (Optional) Close suggestion.

Comments are, of course, lost when a suggestion is closed. If you want to keep them alive, you can inject cells with the following template to mimic comment styles:

html`<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;background:#fbf9f1;font:.875rem/1.25rem var(--sans-serif);padding:.5rem 1rem;max-width:640px">COMMENT_TEXT
`
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