Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Flow

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T354470

I've been continuing to receive the "topic X was archived or removed" notification for edits like this page blanking. These edits happen all the time, and they're generally quickly reverted, but they're a lot more annoying when they now generate notifications. Notifications from them are nearly as frequent as notifications from actual archiving, so this is a significant issue that I really hope you all prioritize resolving before DiscussionTools leaves beta, @ESanders (WMF)/@PPelberg (WMF).

My suggested approach would be that, for any edit that has the "Possible Vandalism" tag (like in the example) — or perhaps any removal at all that's a blanking, or that's made by a human editor rather than a bot — you build in a delay (say, 24hr), and only send the notification if the edit is not reverted after that period. This would substantially reduce the number of spam notifications. I also see little downside risk for legitimate removals — by definition, a topic being archived has become stale, so a slight delay in the notification is unlikely to be an issue.

Upvote, leaving the beta without addressing this problem of Wikipedians usages could nip the tool in the bud. And I don't really want to try to convince people to use DiscussionTools like I tried with Flow after a failed start!

Do we even need to notify users if a bot is removing a section? The role is usually given by community consensus, so abuse (hiding a discussion, for example, out of specific malice) should be virtually impossible or negligible.

The delay of 24 hours is not a suitable solution, I think.

I guess these reviews could count for T316163.

I have actually grown to like the notifications for bot archivals of topics, since it's a way for me to catch unresolved things. E.g. I'll start a thread asking a question, no one will reply, and when I get notified that a bot has archived it I'll realize I need to follow up elsewhere.

Funny, cause I am here wanting to disable this subfeature because archiving bots are spamming me! Imagine being the staff team trying to answer both of our needs. 😝

@Lofhi the fetaure can be disabled in your notifications preferences under "Talk page archiving".

@Sdkb these seem like sensible suggestions for a phabricator task. At the moment the notifications are triggered by the blanking edit, so building in a delay would not be a trivial fix. Filtering out blanking edits would be simpler, but we'd need to check that this convention applies to all wikis and situations.

For my case, I don't want to turn it off, but it would be could to turn off notifications caused by bots!

@ESanders (WMF), feel free to add me as a subscriber on a Phab task, or let me know if I should create it myself.

@Lofhi, could you clarify what sorts of removals you would want to be notified about? Automated bot archiving and (generally spammy) manual removals are the only two types of archive notifications, at least that I've encountered.

@Sdkb yes, please create a new task.