Hi, here's an update on the Flow and Echo changes that went out on Thursday
to enwiki.
We released the new version of Flow/Echo code to enwiki earlier than we
should have. There are bugs, and features that aren’t fully cooked. I’m
sorry that we pushed this out too fast, and created some irritating
distractions that got in the way of people’s editing work.
Having read lots of feedback and seen the reported bugs, we talked as a
team about whether to roll back the latest version, or move forward with
bug fixes and retuned features. Rolling back would probably cause more
problems than it would solve -- some of the reported bugs are already fixed
on Mediawiki, so we can get things on enwiki fixed faster if we deploy
those, rather than roll back to a week ago.
Our plan is to backport some more fixes to Mediawiki later today, and if
those are stable, then we’ll move them to enwiki tomorrow afternoon.
Meanwhile, there are two things that you can do if you’re finding the
current system too distracting right now:
* There is and will be a lot of testing done on the test/sandbox boards. If
you’re getting bothered by notifications to those boards, it’s probably a
good idea to stop watching them for now.
* You can also turn off Echo notifications for Flow in your preferences.
(There’s still one bug that shows up even if you’ve turned them off -- it’s
in the list below.)
Here’s the current status, as I know it right now.
The following items are planned for Mediawiki later today, and then enwiki
tomorrow:
* Make the Alerts tab the default when you open the flyout, unless you’ve
only got new Messages notifications and no new Alerts.
* Email notifications bundled per topic, limited to once every four hours.
* Bundling “created a new topic” Echo notifications, so you don’t get
multiple notifications for the same board at once.
* “No formatting for notification” errors displayed in the notifications
flyout.
Other bugs we’re fixing, but may not be out tomorrow:
* If you’ve never had Flow notifications, don’t make the Alerts link
clickable.
* Swap the color of the Messages and Alerts tabs, so the clickable link is
blue. The active tab shouldn’t be clickable.
* Monobook: Can’t hide topics, because the modal dialog is grayed out.
* When you create a Flow topic and mention a user in the first post, that
user gets two identical notifications.
* With Flow notifications turned off in preferences, a mention on a Flow
post still sends a notification.
* Monobook: Messages/Alerts text in flyout is too small.
* Monobook: Page tabs are not clickable on Flow boards.
* Monobook: Watch star on Flow boards is in the wrong place.
There’s a balance between responding to questions and actually getting
fixes and features tested and out -- so we might be slower in answering
some questions. We’ll keep everybody updated as much as we can, and we
really appreciate all of the feedback, ideas, and bug reports.
Danny