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
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 10:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Ah, I just tried using Flow on mediawiki.org. Now I understand what everyone's talking about.
This is definitely not how Echo was intended to be used. The Echo scope definition[1] on mediawiki.org specifically says that it is not to be used for watchlist items. The developer guide also says that new notifications should be opt-in by default unless they are critical.[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29/Developer_guide#Conv...
Ryan Kaldari
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 8:08 AM, Derric Atzrott < datzrott@alizeepathology.com
wrote:
- *it* *doesn't* *scale* (constantly seeing a "(3)" or new emails pop
up
if you're active in ~6 discussions is a pain)
OK, so how do you suggest changing it?
- _nothing_ on-wiki ever warrants an urgent reaction ever
All the community members who clamored for the return of the Orange
Bar
of
Death seem to disagree with you.
You use the past tense. I *still* clamor for the Orange Bar of Death.
Agreed! I participate in a fair number of discussions pretty regularly, and being notified of mentions and pings is probably my favourite thing about echo. Perhaps I am just a WP:Wikipediholic, but there are definitely things that happen on-wiki that warrant urgent reactions.
Just last night I accidentally screwed up someone's talk page and I'm
very
happy for the notification that I was left a message ("What the hell were you doing in this edit?!?") so that I could revert my edit quickly and apologise.
To me, the answer is obvious: pull messaging out of echo, and summarize notifications on echo for the remaining notifications (i.e. if a notification for a given page is already sitting unread, don't bump the number, and replace the message with "x AND y have happened on z". For messages, give us back the OBOD.
This is actually a good idea. You could have the individual items listed on Special:Notifications and just have the summarized items under the
list
in echo.
- Echo is a consequence of a watchlist page which many people find
insufficiently informative, intuitive, or easy to control.
Yes, the watchlist page needs a total overhaul. Notifications aren't necessarily about articles though. We considered having Echo
integrated
into the watchlist, but this would have make the project much more
complex
and politically contentious. As you say below, "simplicity is the key
to
success".
Don't get that.
You can't change things too much without it becoming politically contentious. One needn't look any further than the Mediaviewer controversy to see
that.
I'm sure there are other reasons as well that I am unaware of.
I want Flow notifications if someone replies to me, or mentions me in a talk post. Or even for everything if that Flow board would happen to be my own talk page for instance. BUT, that is separate from watching a page.
Normally, when watching a page, I would not want notifications on every page that I visit, for every reply to every post, new post or retitled post. I want to see what the last major changes were. Mostly, new topics, and the last change to a new topic.
Currently, I feel like Echo is forcing me to consume Flow discussion, where rather, I only want to be 'subscribed' to them and then consume the subscription at the moment that I feel comfortable doing that. It is like it is mixing my mailbox with my newspaper...
I haven't played around with Flow yet, but if that is how Flow integrates into Echo, I can definitely see that being a huge complaint from a ton of people. I'd find that somewhat annoying too.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott
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Thank you Danny for the explanation.
On Tuesday, September 2, 2014, Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm sorry that we've caused some headaches this week
Don't! This is how deploying first to mediawiki.org can be useful.
Okay, a change in Flow notifications went out with today's release. As of now on Mediawiki.org, subscribing to a Flow board will only give you a notification that a new topic has been created; you won't be automatically subscribed to new discussions on that board. This will help to cut down on the repetitive notifications that people were getting.
We're also going to try out bundling "created a new topic" notifications, when there are multiple new topics created on a board that you're watching. Rather than going directly to the topic page, the bundled "new topic" notifications will take you to the board, sorted by newly-created topics. The plus, obviously, is that you get fewer notifications; the minus is that you may need to scroll down on the board to make sure you don't miss something.
We'll also work on bundling email notifications, and giving the emails a more helpful subject line.
I'm interested to know what people think, now that the notification flood has slowed a little -- does anyone have thoughts about it?
Danny
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thank you Danny for the explanation.
On Tuesday, September 2, 2014, Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm sorry that we've caused some headaches this week
Don't! This is how deploying first to mediawiki.org can be useful.
-- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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