Duplicate categories are created if new members are assigned to channels and channels are assigned to categories

[christianhueserhzdr]

Duplicate categories are created if new members are assigned to channels and channels are assigned to categories

[christianhueserhzdr]

Is there any update on this issue?

[christianhueserhzdr]

Do you need any additional information about this issue from my side? Thanks for letting me know!

[mickmister]

HI @christianhueserhzdr, thank you for filing this issue. I'm thinking we can solve this in the welcomebot plugin, by debouncing the operations of adding the user to multiple channels.

We currently do not do any "waiting" in between adding the user to different channels. If we add some wait period (~3seconds) I think that would be enough to avoid this issue. What are your thoughts on this?

Here are the two places we are doing this operation in a loop:

mattermost-plugin-welcomebot/server/welcomebot.go

Lines 201 to 203 in 502eb34

	for _, channelName := range configMessageAction.ChannelsAddedTo {
	p.joinChannel(action, channelName)
	}

mattermost-plugin-welcomebot/server/welcomebot.go

Lines 114 to 116 in 502eb34

	for _, channelName := range configAction.ChannelsAddedTo {
	p.joinChannel(action, channelName)
	}

[mickmister]

@raghavaggarwal2308 For context, there is a feature called "Channel Actions" in the playbooks plugin https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-plugin-playbooks, that allows an admin to configure the channel to make it so whenever a new user joins the channel, they will have that channel added to a specific channel category.

It seems there is a race condition happening with the welcomebot and playbooks plugins, where the welcomebot plugin is adding users to the channels too quickly, so the "channel category add" process can end up creating new categories instead of using existing ones, which results in duplicate channel categories. If we slow down the welcomebot's channel member modifications to avoid this race condition, I think the issue will be avoided.