Topic on Help talk:Notifications

Would be nice to see the difference between a local and a global notification in the icon, i.e. other color if only crosswiki and two numbers (local/global) instead of the sum of both.

Thanks for the feedback @Nenntmichruhigip

This is really interesting and I'd like to hear some more details. When you refer to "the icon", do you mean the notification badge at the top of any wiki page which indicates the number of pending notifications?

Is your suggestion related to a usecase like this: you are interested in working on a specific local wiki, your attention is caught by the notification badge, and when you open it you realise that the new activity is about a different wiki you are not interested in working at the moment.

Is the above scenario describing accurately your experience? can you provide some more details about it?

Thanks

@Pigsonthewing had a similar request at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-March/083322.html - CCing him for his input on the questions above.

It's pretty much as Pginer describes, plus not being able to quickly see how many local notifications I have.

I also agree with how @Pginer-WMF describes it.

Speaking for myself, I did not understand the reason for splitting the existing notifications into two icons. I understand (theorietically) that one is for things on my User Talk page, while the other is for places (only talk pages, not other namespaces) where my username is linked. But the distinction between the two is unimportant to me, and in practice I just click on which ever one is highlighted, or one and then the other, and would prefer to just have a single list.

I understand that others might find the two icons beneficial -- I'm just reporting this for whatever it's worth, no need to take action on it.

But a distinction that WOULD make a lot of sense to me, would be one icon for local notifications/messages, and another for notifications/messages from other wikis.

So, my personal preference would be to still have two icons, but to have them mean something different from what they do now. I suppose adding a third (or even fourth) icon would be an improvement as well -- it seems cluttered to me, but it would be better than the current setup.

@Pigsonthewing, thanks for confirming this. This is really useful to reconsider the reach for the notification count, since the different pros and cons depend on how much on-wiki activities happen on one wiki at a time or there is a more fluid navigation across wikis.

We probably want to give some more time while the feature is in beta before taking some action on this, since the enablement of cross-wiki notifications has resulted in surfacing a bunch of "forgotten" notifications (e.g., welcome messages from wikis you visited but remained unread) that do not represent the usual notification volume on a regular pace, and may be adding some temporal distortion to the current experience.

@Peteforsyth, thanks for your additional feedback. Let me provide some details:

The creation of two notification channels was originated by differences in the volume/frequency/urgency of notifications. Initially thinking in conversations it was expected that users could follow many conversations and they may be interested on checking immediately the events about their direct contributions (alerts in red) and check conversations (messages) at their own pace. This model had some inconsistencies and users complained about situations like noticing a red badge and checking it immediately just to found it was yet another thanks message (they have preferred to check at their own pace). As a result, there is an ongoing process of organising both channels based more clearly on urgency depending on how the events are worth an interruption. There are more details in this ticket (which was a follow-up of another ticket with some previous context).

We are planning to conduct some research to better understand how users perceive and react to different kinds of notifications. Since depending on the kind and volume of on-wiki activities users get involved in, the expectations can vary.

My answer was based on my consideration of my usual editing habits, rather than as a reaction to the current backlog of notifications.

@Pginer and Peteforsyth: That's what I meant. I'd prefer only a single badge as well. And I like how "thanks" is as important as "reverted", it'd feel wrong to me to make it less important. Imo a thanks is always worth an interruption, a revert not so much.

Re "additional badge for global": I thought of the (single or split) badge containing something like "3/2", meaning "3 local and 2 global", and the badge beeing in a greyish (=more faint) shade of the colour (currently red/blue, I prefer red) if there are only global notifications (i.e. "0/2").

The forgotten welcome messages were actually a good test case, or I still wouldn't know how those global notification currently look like :-)

Thanks everyone for your feedback.

I created a specific ticket to describe the problem, compile feedback around it, explore solutions and discuss them. As I mentioned there, I'd like to try adjusting the badge behaviour without introducing new elements first, but I'm happy to explore more alternatives if needed.