Stash 3.4 now has batched email notifications for pull requests, see here:

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/10/stash-3-4-pull-request-batch-notifications/

rose1, martin.petricek, thanks for the feedback.

Pull request tasks shipped in Stash 3.3. Tasks help participants keep track of changes needed on a pull request. https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/whats-new

Regarding additional workflow around pull requests, we are currently tracking a similar improvement on STASH-2999

The workflow could be also that any comment will require either a reply, or at least dismissing with some "This is done" button near the comment. This will ensure that no comments are missed/skipped.

Especially as you can have comments scattered on all commits and the whole diff, so it is quite easy to miss something.

We would like to wrap a simple workflow around pull requests, similar to the functionality Code Collaborator provides out of the box. Something like:

Open -> In progress
In progress -> Open | Cancelled | Approved

It would also be great if you could mark things as 'defects' that require attention before the code review can be approved.

Today, we ran into yet another reason why a single email for the entire review rather than a mail for every comment is better: we use Google for our email and they've started rate limiting our stash instance as it's sending too much email. Now, not only do our developers get lots of email, but it arrives much, much slower than it should (which is the opposite of what the email for every comment was meant to achieve).

The notification system in Stash is by far it's weakest area. Not just the amount of spam from commenting, for us, the emails are really badly broken in Lotus Notes, there are images that aren't displayed (including the most important one, the link to the review), there is white on white text and all sorts of horrendously bad formatting and display decisions.

Stash needs to batch up emails, and it also needs to embed any images is uses urgently for it to be taken seriously by the Enterprise sector, as currently it looks and works in a very unprofessional matter.

Sending pending comments when a new code from that author appears in stash may be also useful, but you still need a feature to commit/send all pending comments even without any code (typically the person doing the code review won't send any code of their own to the branch).
It may be even undesirable to auto-send comments on new commit (if half-done review comments will be sent to a developer because he pushed some hotfix - the reviewer may rather wish instead to amend those unsent comments based on contents of the hotfix instead of sending them all away)

Hello fellow Stash spam sufferers. We just upgraded to Stash 2.12 to 3.2. Sadly, it's all sizzle, no sausage. The spam continues.

Since we don't even have fine grained control over Stash notifications, I intend to nobble every notification by killing the mail server configuration. We will lose nothing, because nobody ever reads the emails. We all just have rules that send them to a black hole mail folder, never to be seen again. Once a day we log into Stash and see if we have any reviews pending.

As a possible alternative, I setup HipChat. With Go2Group's HipChat plugin in Stash. I have one HipChat room per Stash project - so directing Stash notifications to HipChat on a per project/room basis. These notifications seem better than email - it's still spammy, but the temporary nature of chat is a better fit than email. Plus, with the notifications from Go2Group, it's much easier to see, in a glance, the difference between a Pull Request creation, an update, a comment and a comment reply. (As compared to email subject headings.) Furthermore, the text of the comments and replies comes in the notification. So a quick scan of the chat room every couple of hours gives a very fast overview of Pull Request activity and status. Still not ideal, but a bit better I think.

Linking emails with the next commit is an interesting take on the issue. If that is implemented, there would need to be some flag along the lines of "delay notification for this batch of comments until the next code update" and have the default as false. Having that on each comment being replied to (rather than on the batch) would be too noisy IMHO and lead us back into the path of way too many emails.

The main issue being that a comment which needs a response before code can be changed should not be hanging around waiting for said code to be changed before the notification is sent (this would cause the inverse of the issues we have today).

Recently we started to use Stash quite heavily for code reviews and the one-email-per-comment system is already driving half of our dev team mad (due to to relatively thorouch code review, sometimes there are dozen comments per issue per reviewer, often followed by dozen replies).

Having some batch mode (you would need to "commit" all your comments and that would generate one email) would also ease the workflow a bit, as the author will write many "I fixed this/I have fixed it in other way/This cannot be fixed" replies and then commit the replies right after pushing relevant changes, so the reviewer can then check the comments and code to see if the fix is ok.

Now reviewer gets spammed by "i will fix this" comments and perhaps hour later a fixed code is pushed to repo.
Coupling pushing the fixed code and all the comments would really help to improve the workflow and reduce spam.