Opting out of individual Echo notifications - EE

Fabrice Florin

27 Mar 27 Mar

1:55 a.m.

Hi TheHelpfulOne, Thanks so much for testing Echo today, and for reporting on your experience with user rights! I am also experiencing problems with the user right notification with this release, even though it worked well for me earlier. You should be getting notifications both when a user right is added and removed, as outlined in this feature requirement: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#User_rights We will investigate this issue tomorrow. Thanks for bringing it up! Regarding your other question about user preferences, each notification category can be set independently, as described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Receive_Notificatio… However, system notifications like user right changes cannot be dismissed, because we believe they are too important. Besides user rights, this also includes the welcome and get started messages in this first release. The other notification where preferences are limited is 'talk page messages', which now can only be turned off for email notifications, not for web notifications (because we believe they are too important to dismiss on the web). Please let us know if this general plan works for you, or if you recommend any changes. I am sure this issue will be discussed again once we deploy on en-wiki, but we are starting to freeze features so we can have our first release in early April. ;o) Cheers, Fabrice On Mar 26, 2013, at 5:33 PM, Thehelpfulone wrote:

...

Hi all, I've been playing around with Echo on MediaWiki.org and noticed that in my preferences I can configure a number of different notifications. (See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo) I've also tested the User Right notifications that were just deployed and whilst you receive an email when you have a user right added to your account, you don't currently get one when a user right is removed from your account. That's probably an oversight, but from what I've been told the option to opt out from any email notifications intentionally isn't available so as to reduce the number of preferences for users to configure. Another justification is that a user is unlikely to have their user rights changed too often, so email traffic should be minimal. This seems reasonable, but for future notifications, how are we going to decide whether something is worth a preference or not? I'm thinking that anything that technically affects your editing, e.g. a notification that you've been blocked or renamed (if Echo supports that in the future) would be something that probably shouldn't be opt-out-able. Can anyone think of any other notifications that should not be opt-out-able (or does anyone think that all notifications should be individually opt-out-able?) -- Thehelpfulone https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

_______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/

Reply

Oliver Keyes

5:32 p.m.

No, enwp is a project where *getting* userrights isn't meant to be important - in the sense that userrights are not meant to be something that puts you further up the hierarchy than other users. That's very different from 'having additional buttons is not a big deal'. If someone is given rollback because, hey, an admin has identified that they're useful and such and might benefit from it, it's highly beneficial for them to be poked and given a brief "so you've got this [link to rules about using it|new button now]". Otherwise we end up with situations where good-faith contributors get snarked for not following rules nobody informed them they had to, or for misusing tools they didn't necessarily understand were a privilege. At the same time, it's nice to have an actual ping of "your expertise has been recognised, good job". On 27 March 2013 02:40, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

User rights changes are important? I would think that would depend entirely on the project, and mww and enwp are two where such either at least isnt supposed to be a big deal, or where it really isnt in practice either. Speaking of no big deal, I wonder if I can talk someone into making me a crat. On 26/03/2013 18:55, Fabrice Florin wrote: Hi TheHelpfulOne, Thanks so much for testing Echo today, and for reporting on your experience with user rights! I am also experiencing problems with the user right notification with this release, even though it worked well for me earlier. You should be getting notifications both when a user right is added and removed, as outlined in this feature requirement: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#User_rights We will investigate this issue tomorrow. Thanks for bringing it up! Regarding your other question about user preferences, each notification category can be set independently, as described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Receive_Notificatio… However, system notifications like user right changes cannot be dismissed, because we believe they are too important. Besides user rights, this also includes the welcome and get started messages in this first release. The other notification where preferences are limited is 'talk page messages', which now can only be turned off for email notifications, not for web notifications (because we believe they are too important to dismiss on the web). Please let us know if this general plan works for you, or if you recommend any changes. I am sure this issue will be discussed again once we deploy on en-wiki, but we are starting to freeze features so we can have our first release in early April. ;o) Cheers, Fabrice On Mar 26, 2013, at 5:33 PM, Thehelpfulone wrote: Hi all, I've been playing around with Echo on MediaWiki.org and noticed that in my preferences I can configure a number of different notifications. (See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo) I've also tested the User Right notifications that were just deployed and whilst you receive an email when you have a user right *added *to your account, you don't currently get one when a user right is *removed *from your account. That's probably an oversight, but from what I've been told the option to opt out from any email notifications intentionally isn't available so as to reduce the number of preferences for users to configure. Another justification is that a user is unlikely to have their user rights changed too often, so email traffic should be minimal. This seems reasonable, but for future notifications, how are we going to decide whether something is worth a preference or not? I'm thinking that anything that technically affects your editing, e.g. a notification that you've been blocked or renamed (if Echo supports that in the future) would be something that probably shouldn't be opt-out-able. Can anyone think of any other notifications that should not be opt-out-able (or does anyone think that all notifications should be individually opt-out-able?) -- Thehelpfulone https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing listEE@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee -- -— Isarra _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

Reply

Oliver Keyes

5:59 p.m.

Sure, and, if someone is blocked then the blocking admin should be leaving a note. It's great if we assume that admins will always do so, albeit an unnecessary workflow created by software deficiencies. 'Expected' does not, also, necessarily mean 'instantly visible'; things like autopatrolled are rather silent in displaying whether you have them. On 27 March 2013 16:47, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Aye, its a useful notification, rather like a notice that a page they care about has been moved is useful, but not something that should be that important. If a rights change is unexpected and they need the briefing then the admin/crat should really be giving them a more personal message about it anyway to explain the situation, and if it is expected, well, its like any other change on the wiki. On 27/03/2013 10:32, Oliver Keyes wrote: No, enwp is a project where *getting* userrights isn't meant to be important - in the sense that userrights are not meant to be something that puts you further up the hierarchy than other users. That's very different from 'having additional buttons is not a big deal'. If someone is given rollback because, hey, an admin has identified that they're useful and such and might benefit from it, it's highly beneficial for them to be poked and given a brief "so you've got this [link to rules about using it|new button now]". Otherwise we end up with situations where good-faith contributors get snarked for not following rules nobody informed them they had to, or for misusing tools they didn't necessarily understand were a privilege. At the same time, it's nice to have an actual ping of "your expertise has been recognised, good job". On 27 March 2013 02:40, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:

User rights changes are important? I would think that would depend entirely on the project, and mww and enwp are two where such either at least isnt supposed to be a big deal, or where it really isnt in practice either. Speaking of no big deal, I wonder if I can talk someone into making me a crat. On 26/03/2013 18:55, Fabrice Florin wrote: Hi TheHelpfulOne, Thanks so much for testing Echo today, and for reporting on your experience with user rights! I am also experiencing problems with the user right notification with this release, even though it worked well for me earlier. You should be getting notifications both when a user right is added and removed, as outlined in this feature requirement: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#User_rights We will investigate this issue tomorrow. Thanks for bringing it up! Regarding your other question about user preferences, each notification category can be set independently, as described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Receive_Notificatio… However, system notifications like user right changes cannot be dismissed, because we believe they are too important. Besides user rights, this also includes the welcome and get started messages in this first release. The other notification where preferences are limited is 'talk page messages', which now can only be turned off for email notifications, not for web notifications (because we believe they are too important to dismiss on the web). Please let us know if this general plan works for you, or if you recommend any changes. I am sure this issue will be discussed again once we deploy on en-wiki, but we are starting to freeze features so we can have our first release in early April. ;o) Cheers, Fabrice On Mar 26, 2013, at 5:33 PM, Thehelpfulone wrote: Hi all, I've been playing around with Echo on MediaWiki.org and noticed that in my preferences I can configure a number of different notifications. (See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo) I've also tested the User Right notifications that were just deployed and whilst you receive an email when you have a user right *added *to your account, you don't currently get one when a user right is *removed *from your account. That's probably an oversight, but from what I've been told the option to opt out from any email notifications intentionally isn't available so as to reduce the number of preferences for users to configure. Another justification is that a user is unlikely to have their user rights changed too often, so email traffic should be minimal. This seems reasonable, but for future notifications, how are we going to decide whether something is worth a preference or not? I'm thinking that anything that technically affects your editing, e.g. a notification that you've been blocked or renamed (if Echo supports that in the future) would be something that probably shouldn't be opt-out-able. Can anyone think of any other notifications that should not be opt-out-able (or does anyone think that all notifications should be individually opt-out-able?) -- Thehelpfulone https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing listEE@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee -- -— Isarra _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ EE mailing listEE@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee -- -— Isarra _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

Reply

Oliver Keyes

6:14 p.m.

Ah, I misunderstood; I thought this dissonance of views was about the notification itself rather than the email associated with it :) On 27 March 2013 17:13, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

That they may not get a note doesnt mean they need to get an email about it, though. On 27/03/2013 10:59, Oliver Keyes wrote: Sure, and, if someone is blocked then the blocking admin should be leaving a note. It's great if we assume that admins will always do so, albeit an unnecessary workflow created by software deficiencies. 'Expected' does not, also, necessarily mean 'instantly visible'; things like autopatrolled are rather silent in displaying whether you have them. On 27 March 2013 16:47, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Aye, its a useful notification, rather like a notice that a page they care about has been moved is useful, but not something that should be that important. If a rights change is unexpected and they need the briefing then the admin/crat should really be giving them a more personal message about it anyway to explain the situation, and if it is expected, well, its like any other change on the wiki. On 27/03/2013 10:32, Oliver Keyes wrote: No, enwp is a project where *getting* userrights isn't meant to be important - in the sense that userrights are not meant to be something that puts you further up the hierarchy than other users. That's very different from 'having additional buttons is not a big deal'. If someone is given rollback because, hey, an admin has identified that they're useful and such and might benefit from it, it's highly beneficial for them to be poked and given a brief "so you've got this [link to rules about using it|new button now]". Otherwise we end up with situations where good-faith contributors get snarked for not following rules nobody informed them they had to, or for misusing tools they didn't necessarily understand were a privilege. At the same time, it's nice to have an actual ping of "your expertise has been recognised, good job". On 27 March 2013 02:40, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:

User rights changes are important? I would think that would depend entirely on the project, and mww and enwp are two where such either at least isnt supposed to be a big deal, or where it really isnt in practice either. Speaking of no big deal, I wonder if I can talk someone into making me a crat. On 26/03/2013 18:55, Fabrice Florin wrote: Hi TheHelpfulOne, Thanks so much for testing Echo today, and for reporting on your experience with user rights! I am also experiencing problems with the user right notification with this release, even though it worked well for me earlier. You should be getting notifications both when a user right is added and removed, as outlined in this feature requirement: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#User_rights We will investigate this issue tomorrow. Thanks for bringing it up! Regarding your other question about user preferences, each notification category can be set independently, as described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Receive_Notificatio… However, system notifications like user right changes cannot be dismissed, because we believe they are too important. Besides user rights, this also includes the welcome and get started messages in this first release. The other notification where preferences are limited is 'talk page messages', which now can only be turned off for email notifications, not for web notifications (because we believe they are too important to dismiss on the web). Please let us know if this general plan works for you, or if you recommend any changes. I am sure this issue will be discussed again once we deploy on en-wiki, but we are starting to freeze features so we can have our first release in early April. ;o) Cheers, Fabrice On Mar 26, 2013, at 5:33 PM, Thehelpfulone wrote: Hi all, I've been playing around with Echo on MediaWiki.org and noticed that in my preferences I can configure a number of different notifications. (See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo) I've also tested the User Right notifications that were just deployed and whilst you receive an email when you have a user right *added *to your account, you don't currently get one when a user right is *removed *from your account. That's probably an oversight, but from what I've been told the option to opt out from any email notifications intentionally isn't available so as to reduce the number of preferences for users to configure. Another justification is that a user is unlikely to have their user rights changed too often, so email traffic should be minimal. This seems reasonable, but for future notifications, how are we going to decide whether something is worth a preference or not? I'm thinking that anything that technically affects your editing, e.g. a notification that you've been blocked or renamed (if Echo supports that in the future) would be something that probably shouldn't be opt-out-able. Can anyone think of any other notifications that should not be opt-out-able (or does anyone think that all notifications should be individually opt-out-able?) -- Thehelpfulone https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee _______________________________ Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF) Donate to keep Wikipedia free: https://donate.wikimedia.org/ _______________________________________________ EE mailing listEE@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee -- -— Isarra _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ EE mailing listEE@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee -- -— Isarra _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liaison, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation

Reply

Steven Walling

7:28 p.m.

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

Well, both, really, but this thread was more about the emails and general options than what the specific options were, far as I can tell. But I guess if I had an actual point, why are the options so specific? It seems like there should only be so many discrete types of notifications, nevermind what the notifications themselves are - perhaps something along the lines of edits, log actions, messages, personal notices, frivolous personal notices, general notices - some will wind up on the talkpage equivalent, some in the watchlist equivalent, but while that particular detail is flow territory, that is still what the user will see - and the user will expect the preferences to correspond to what they see. So if personal notices like block, userrights, etc would need to go on the talkpage equivalent since folks might need to respond to them, they should have a preference governing personal notices that would cover all of those (and another for the more frivolous ones, but obviously worded better). Currently looking at the notifications preferences on mww, they are very specific, and that kind of specificity should not be necessary, nor does it scale well. According to the above grouping, for instance, these currently appear to be two message types and some minor personal notices, so why not just lump them as such or similar? Then folks could have fairly straight-forward options to cover everything without it being too cluttered, and it would be much more intuitive to boot once we have the feeds in place as well.

Regardless of the particular notification (I agree with what Matt and Oliver are saying about the importance of permissions changes), Isarra is 100% right that need to focus on simplicity when it comes to the preferences, and strongly consider sacrificing more fine-grained control for the sake of clarity, scaling, and easy of use. A relevant bit of reading is "Checkboxes That Kill Your Product<http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill>" -- the former head of UX on Firefox on convoluted and opaque preferences that accumulate over the years. For an example of best practices: iOS notifications are pretty strict about not letting you specify which individual notifications you can get from an app, only the method and volume of notifications for that app. This scales well across the thousands of different applications. I believe Android 4.2+ behaves the same way as well. -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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Isarra Yos

6:55 p.m.

Site notifications are warranted in that case, but not email. From the interface it appears the only way to disable the email ones would be to disable all email notifications, but that seems like overkill. On 27/03/2013 11:22, Matthew Flaschen wrote:

...

On 03/26/2013 10:40 PM, Isarra Yos wrote:

User rights changes are important? I would think that would depend entirely on the project, and mww and enwp are two where such either at least isnt supposed to be a big deal, or where it really isnt in practice either.

I can't think of any project where it wouldn't be worth knowing about a rights change. Even if it's something as simple as confirmed or filemover, it's worth knowing. It's useful information, particularly if accompanied with a description of the new right (which I believe is the plan). And it won't realistically result in excess notices, since these don't get toggled on and off all the time. Matt Flaschen _______________________________________________ EE mailing list EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee

-- -— Isarra

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