Designing a newsletter architecture. Brainstorming session with Shibu.

Designing A flow for newsletter:

Requirement Scenario:

1. User should be able to subscribe:
2. Any author in the platform.
3. Any tags in the platform.
4. How: (how does user subscribe to the platform?)
5. If already logged in, tap on follow/subscribe button
6. subscriberId and channelId will be passed to API
7. If not logged in, for the minimal input we ask email
8. email of subscriber & channelId will be passed to API

Why don't we narrow down the scenario here?

Why not just enforce authentication to user?

1. Unauthenticated User => enforce to login => after login
2. after login => it's just 1 scenario here which might be easier to manage them two scenarios.

Why we should consider logging in user? basically enforcing user to auth?

1. What if user inputs invalid email address?
2. subscribes with abcd@gmail.com
3. Waste of resources,
4. As sending mass email to invalid addresses is not smart
5. Db retention of bad data is not ideal.
6. Creates simplicity as we only need to solve for 1 case.

So, if we want to enforce the authentication for newsletter.

what's the ideal way?

Max step i.e user interaction to subscribe should be 3 for unauthenticated user?

We will pass the welcome-form this time to reduce the input from user. to maintain a smooth flow.

Now, the challenge is to figure out how are we going to design this newsletter architecture for two different scenarios.

Unauthenticated Flow: Just an email from the user.

Authenticated Flow: Logged in user

after the discussion, we concluded that to avoid unnecessary validation and be optimise on the current resources, we have decided to take the route, i.e user should be authenticated to subscribe