July 2019: T227853 is open in order to see which notifications shoudn't be deleted.
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/159413/ - This update adds a script to delete any Notifications that are older than the most recent 2,000.
Up until now, they were stored indefinitely, meaning that some users have many thousands of read Notifications adding up in the database. 2,000 was chosen, because it is the number of Notifications that the "mark all as read" button effects.
This change is mainly intended to reduce a performance bottleneck.
It will also enable future separation (perhaps even filtering) of the different types of Notification. There's a tangential discussion about some feature-requests related to this, at en:WP:VPI#Can we have a color scheme for the notifications count, please, and, if not, perhaps some other color than red? currently.
What if I want to preserve important notifications and delete the newest instead?
For indefinite preservation, I think the best option would probably be to enable the "email" preference for whichever notification types you want to keep records for.
Is there a particular type(s) of notifications that you're thinking of? Giving a few examples almost always helps. :)
I would have thought the number of users with > 2000 edits would be small. If you ware worried about database size, maybe deleted some of those millions of "users" who have never edited or been welcomed.
This change was just regarding number of echo notifications, not edits.
@Ottawahitech, what do you mean? You want to know how many notifications someone has?
Ah, English language. :) Thank you Rich.
Ottawahitech, why do you need to know how many notification someone has? It is some private information.
I want to know how many notifications I have at enwiki where I am indefinitely blocked since 2017 (I think), after almost ten years of contributions. I have not been able to participate (even my talk-page access has been removed), so there is no way for me to do things like thank people, etc.
I am still hoping that my indef block will be lifted someday, and I would like to keep my notifications at least until such time.
I see 52 for me: click on the arrows close to "1-50" to see the total.
This is not optimal, but we never had any feedback about displaying the total.
Looks like some of my notifications have already been deleted then? Can they be recovered?
I have no idea where to look for "arrows" and where "1-50" is supposed to be. I suspect this may look different to someone using a different platform. For example, is this viewable to someone using a [[w:mobile]], or someone using a [[w:linux]] system?
BTW, I pretty much gave up on anyone responding to my questions here on mediawiki. [[User:Quidity]] was always pretty prompt, but I think he is no longer involved?
Another BTW, since FLOW is being tested here: where can I provide feedback to the FLOW developers?
AH.. so after 39 clicks I see that I have 1996 notifications... I would really rather they not be deleted, it seems contrary to the spirit of the WIki to loose history like this. By this principle we would delete page history over 2000, or maybe decide we could manage with the 2000 most important articles! :)
Is it possible to compare Notifications to Article history? I don't think it is.
Article history are a fundamental feature for the wikis: without them we wouldn't have the reliability we have.
Notifications are just tokens you immediately take action from. Did you had once to find something on the 1996 notifications you've received since 2013, apart from the 20 most recent ones? It is a real question, not some cynical rhetoric wording. :)
Yes, in particular the number of thanks for fixing up reference names is an important metric. Keeping thanks is also important for understanding social issues. Having a list of mentions is useful if you can't find a discussion you were pinged in.
I would have thought the number of users with > 2000 edits would be small. The number with > 2,000 echoes smaller still.
Rich Farmbrough 02:15, 7 May 2016 (UTC).
Please... I do not see the word kilobyte here, so you really are just poking at this with a stick... And if you don't see why that is relevant, you should ''especially'' stop talking about what should be done about it! Apologies,
I should just add my opinion. Never delete any notification ever without a genuine good reason. I have hundreds of notifications from the last year. I don't want someone to come along and delete them while I am off doing something even if they think I've seen them before, They're mine. Is that not fair?
I agree. Please stop deleting information that is important for contributors. Please don't decide for me what is important and what is not!
> Very very fair imio
This is a Flow comment: I have no idea why I wrote this and who I was responding to?????
... and to save others the hassle of trying to follow links, here is the link I ended up at explaining why Flow is no longer under development. It was written by Danny Horn and was dated 2015! https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-September/082993.html
I now have a good example of where this has made my life difficult. An editor caused over 2000 notifications to my account, and this means everything previous has been wiped.
This is a seriously flawed idea.
Looks like there is least one more discussion forum for notifications at Help talk:Notifications. Divide & conquer? Ottawahitech (talk) 02:24, 14 December 2020 (UTC)