Hi design folks,

2013/6/21 Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org>
In case you haven't seen, User:Rillke on Commons has implemented a
(default-on!) gadget that makes it possible to subscribe to
notifications of different types, e.g. policy changes, new features,
etc. These are shown as watchlist banners and upon login.

Here's a screenshot of the "subscription" interface:
http://i.imgur.com/gdImENz.png

IMO that type of gadget lends supports to the notion of shooting for a
subscription model to be ultimately integrated with Echo so that users
can get standard read-once notifications about things they care about
while keeping the core UI clutter-free.

Following up on this : the documentation is at [1]

On top of the topic feature mentioned by Erik, Rillke’s watchlist notices are loaded with other cool features, like built-in i18n, scheduling, geotargeting (!), filtering per usergroup/browser/OS/language

And Rillke put together a kick-ass wizard to create such notices [2] − the best way to walk into the above mentioned features.

(and the wizard itself is i18n using the Translate extension ^__^)

[1] <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Watchlist_messages>
[2] <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help:Watchlist_messages/Wizard&withJS=MediaWiki:WatchlistMessageCreator.js#step0>

Hope that helps,

--
Jean-Fred