Next week's software update will include the first steps of some significant updates to the Echo system. We need your feedback, to plan the next steps.
There's going to be a change to the icon that opens the flyout, (the list of items etc). There will be two icons: one for alerts and one for messages. (see phab:T108190 for extensive details). You can see an example here:
The first flyout ("alerts") will still contain most of the notifications, for now.
The second flyout ("messages") will contain notifications about your new usertalk-page messages (and flow messages on the wikis using it).
This change is based on longterm feedback from highly active editors, that they would like a clearer indication than just a "red number", of what type of notification is waiting for them. (See phab:T58476 and linked tasks.) A number of options were suggested, and this is the first step towards that.
We'd appreciate further feedback on this change: What other notification types should be moved into the "messages" section? The list of existing notification types includes: usertalk messages, thanks, mentions, page-links, page-reviews, edit-reverts, system messages. There are more types being discussed.
(Some editors have suggested splitting every single notification type into a unique icon, but there are already a dozen sub-types of notification, with more expected in the long-term, so that is unfeasible.)
Thank you!
Side-note: Work has also begun on Cross-wiki Notifications (phab:T67661).