New version of Echo on MediaWiki.org: User mentions! - EE

8 Mar 2013

Hey folks,

We just released a new version of Echo on MediaWiki.org, for your interactive pleasure. 

Can you help us take it for a spin?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Notifications

For tips on how to test Echo on MediaWiki.org, visit this testing page:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Testing

The main new feature is the long-awaited 'User mention notification', which you
can read up about here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#User_Mention

Note that we limited the scope of this feature initially, to make sure that folks
don't get too many notifications in our first release.

Here are the current constraints:
• this feature only works if the mention of your name is linked to your user page (with
double bracket links ([[ ]]), not single brackets)
• this feature only works for posts inside a section of a talk page other than yours
(doesn't work on articles or 'Wikipedia:' pages)
• this feature only works if the post is signed -- by adding four tildes (Fabrice Florin
(WMF) (talk) 00:53, 8 March 2013 (UTC)) when the edit is posted, which are then converted
into a signature

We would appreciate your thoughts about possibly expanding the scope of this feature to
cover more use cases, such as:
• support links with single brackets
• support user links on 'Wikipedia:' pages
• support user links on article pages
• support user links without requiring a signature

What do you think? Should we expand this feature for those use cases? any other use cases
we might have missed?

Also, be sure to check the fancy new 'Dismiss feature', which lets you turn off
notification types you don't want from inside the notification flyout. This has the
same effect as turning them off in preferences, but is more accessible.

Speaking of preferences, you can now turn off notification types you don't want for
either web or email notifications, using a shiny new HTML table, which you can check out
here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo

We're still planning to tweak the copy on this preferences page, but the functionality
is here -- and it took Kaldari some time to get this HTML table function through core, so
we hope you can use it for other features as well. In the future, this table can be
expanded to control notifications you get on your mobile phone and other channels.

We've also done a lot of work on bundling, job queue, metrics and code refactoring,
but these are hard for you to test -- or have not yet been deployed.

Our next deployment on MediaWiki.org is now scheduled for March 18th, when we expect to
launch a number of new notifications and features:
• Thank you notification
• User rights change
• job queue
• metrics
• HTML email
• Metrics

Enjoy!

Fabrice and the E2 team