The new version of Flow and Echo on Mediawiki.org right now is the team's first draft of the new notifications and subscriptions feature. This version definitely has some flaws, and we're going to be re-tuning the system in the next sprint to make it work better. We held back this version from going live to enwiki, because we knew there were some bugs and that we needed to make changes.
So here are some notes on where we are, and what we're about to fix:
One notification item per topic
The big advantage that individual subscriptions offers is the ability to focus on the conversations that you're interested in, and tune out the ones that you don't care about. This could be especially helpful for people who are involved in a lot of conversations, because you won't have to keep checking diffs when someone responds to another thread that you're not interested in.
But a key point to making that actually work is to only give somebody one notification item per thread. If your Echo icon says 3, it's because there are three separate conversations that have had activity since you last checked (A, B and C). If 100 more people post messages on thread B, then you'll still only get one notification item for that discussion. The number on the Echo icon will only go up to 4 if somebody responds on thread D.
This is partly done in the current version, but in one case, we're currently sending two notifications for the same thing. We're going to kill one of them.
Subscribing to a board
We talked a lot on the team about what subscribing to a board means. There are two versions: 1) subscribe to a board = subscribe me to every new topic, or 2) subscribe to a board = notification that a new topic has been created, but don't subscribe me to that topic.
In the latest version, we did #1, but we knew it might be too much. This is the kind of thing that you can play with when your product is only deployed on about five active pages on Mediawiki, and one of them is a sandbox.
So now we've gotten some really clear feedback that #1 is too much, and it feels like spam. We're going to change this to #2 in the next version, which will probably go out to Mediawiki.org next week.
After that, we're still going to be retuning to make sure that the notifications are helpful. One possibility is to combine the notifications about new topics being created -- maybe rolling them up into one notification item, which links to the board with the new topics highlighted.
We also need to keep working on the best way to represent this on the Watchlist. Some people only (or primarily) use Watchlists to keep track of conversations, some people only (or primarily) use Echo, and some use both. We want to make it possible to keep track using either tool, but there's going to be a lot of tuning to make it work.
Email notifications We're also sending
way too many email notifications right now. We're going to dial that back, and this is actually a good opportunity for me to ask for feedback on how.
One idea is to treat Flow emails the way that we treat watchlist emails -- you get one email for the first post on a topic that you subscribe to, and then we don't send any more emails about that thread until you visit the page. Another version is to use email bundling, where we send the first email about a topic, and then bundle any following notifications every four hours. Right now, the plan is to try the four-hour bundling version next, but I'd be happy to hear people's thoughts about it.
So I hope this helps to explain what's going on -- what you're seeing right now is not at all a final version that will be rolling out as default to the universe. :)
Both the Echo notifications and the watchlist are really important to me and the team. Individual subscriptions and notifications have the potential to make wiki discussions a lot more efficient for active users, but we need to find the ways to be helpful and not annoying. It's going to take us a few iterations before we get to that sweet spot.
I'm sorry that we've caused some headaches this week -- we'll get another iteration out, and we're going to keep the experimental stuff contained to Mediawiki.org while we're making these changes. We'll keep talking about what's going on, feel free to ping me with ideas or questions or complaints.
Danny