Hi all.
I'm including some thoughts on Echo below. - *it* *doesn't* *scale* (constantly seeing a "(3)" or new emails pop up if you're active in ~6 discussions is a pain) - _nothing_ on-wiki ever warrants an urgent reaction ever - distracting, especially as I'm getting more active with talking - this last point caused me to switch it off entirely everywhere - I'm reading an article to get more information and this piece of software drags me back into editing while I'm merely reading something and intend to return to the watchlist in the evening - Echo a consequence of newcomers being insufficiently communicated to (i.e. too few helpers involved talking with newcomers at big wikis, let's automate that - NO! THAT's STUPID! have it semi-automated -- the entire wiki software should be centered around a big edit box and a less prominent, but comfortable, box for leaving custom messages to articles and users talk pages) - Echo is a consequence of a watchlist page which many people find insufficiently informative, intuitive, or easy to control. - special:watchlist and special:notifications overlap in functionality - the 'notifications' tab lacks a 'watchlist' column so that I can choose where events go (email, echo's nagging, or watchlist passively) - the extra term ('notifications') is clutter - please consider improving usability of the watchlist and integrating any echo fields into it - and make watchlist easier to manage - integrate these two tools together - echo is really conceptually merely a new channel where to pipe watchlist items - simplicity is the key to success
svetlana
-- (original rant attached for reference)
Dunno. I'm pissed by Echo. Hundreds of hours of time wasted looking at a reply at a talk page or at an edit someone thanked me for. Which are not urgent at all. Yet the software notified me of them real-time. Echo is a consequence of newcomers being insufficiently communicated to (i.e. too few helpers involved talking with newcomers at big wikis). Also, a consequence of a watchlist page which many people find insufficiently informative, intuitive, or easy to control. ---- looking at Echo's 'thanks' notifications for a few months before figuring out that it's possible to disable that like I'm reading a page about electrons on-wiki and doing something of interest to me, it pops up with its number [1] I have to go and watch it despite knowing it clearly that _nothing_ on-wiki ever needs an urgent reaction about couple minutes on that daily.. clearly doesn't encourage me to talk more with people if you sum that up, it's a few tens or hundreds of hours of time wasted this year I'm supposed to concentrate and all those notifications are distracting -- I know where I am, I don't need them I became remotely active at mediawiki or meta and started getting these notifications non-stop. Frick off. This doesn't scale. does this explain the source of trouble? :-) ---- well, I ticked off everything 'web', this set it to 0 for now, but I wouldn't like to see it at all since it's bearing no extra information and people who are not sitting in a cave will find that *it* *simply* *doesn't* *scale* anyone active in ~6 discussions will find it a source of nag ---- I wouldn't like it to go forward really -- improve the watchlist instead and make it more useable please :) spending time on a means to thank a user via software, or to ask him a 'mention' at a discussion, doesn't look very productive to me -- this all can be put into watchlist nicely it doesn't need to be an extension, it needs to be an improvement in the core what to do with watchlist -- web notify thru echo, or email, or nothing and just have me peek at it in the evening extra concept 'echo', 'notification' is extra clutter nobody needs it, both these lists should be configurable in one tab of prefs add a 'watchlist' column to the 'notifications' tab -- so that I can tell whether I'd like to see thanks piped over to my watchlist etc I can see simplicity as a path to success reword things a little, name it 'watchlist notifications', make it more flexible and make it pipe things over to a single special page instead of 2 special pages this special page should remain as compact as a watchlist is -- the design of the current 'special:notifications' page is not at all good on a 600x800 screen managing watchlist is hard, fixing that is long overdue I'd _really_ like to see echo and watchlist back together in a simple intuitive system
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 10:20 AM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
Hi all.
I'm including some thoughts on Echo below.
- *it* *doesn't* *scale* (constantly seeing a "(3)" or new emails pop up if you're active in ~6 discussions is a pain)
+1
- _nothing_ on-wiki ever warrants an urgent reaction ever
+1
- distracting, especially as I'm getting more active with talking
+1
- this last point caused me to switch it off entirely everywhere
Not yet for me. But it is almost there, since I started to ignore the red ballon due to its presence every time (with 20+ items).
- I'm reading an article to get more information and this piece of software drags me back into editing while I'm merely reading something and intend to return to the watchlist in the evening
+1
...
- special:watchlist and special:notifications overlap in functionality
+2. See also existing bugs https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20541 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21610
Helder
tl;dr
On 1 Sep 2014 16:09, "Bartosz Dziewoński" matma.rex@gmail.com wrote:
tl;dr
+1 :)
Svetlana, I'm not quite sure what you are proposing here. I understand you want to integrate them but I'm not sure why or how. Echo gives notifications such as changes in user permissions which do not have associated edits... so I'm not sure how that would work.
Maybe start with helping us understand the main problem you are trying to solve. It sounds like you are saying there are various problems but I'm not understanding any of them. Maybe pick the biggest problem you see with Echo that is the most important to solve and let's start there... it's never good to start with proposed solutions.
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 5:25 PM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe pick the biggest problem you see with Echo that is the most important to solve and let's start there..
Well, these are reasonably big and would be a good start: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-September/078473.html
Helder
- *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.
- distracting, especially as I'm getting more active with talking
The biggest complaint we received about Echo from the community was that it was too easy to ignore.
- I'm reading an article to get more information and this piece of
software drags me back into editing while I'm merely reading something and intend to return to the watchlist in the evening
OK. What should we do about that?
- Echo a consequence of newcomers being insufficiently communicated to
(i.e. too few helpers involved talking with newcomers at big wikis, let's automate that - NO! THAT's STUPID! have it semi-automated -- the entire wiki software should be centered around a big edit box and a less prominent, but comfortable, box for leaving custom messages to articles and users talk pages)
I'm not really following what point you're trying to make about Echo here. Should we just remove it?
- 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".
- special:watchlist and special:notifications overlap in functionality
True, do you have a suggestion for fixing that?
- the 'notifications' tab lacks a 'watchlist' column so that I can choose
where events go (email, echo's nagging, or watchlist passively)
The first part of this sentence is true, but like I said, notifications aren't necessarily tied to articles. Also the watchlist page is already extremely cluttered. How would you suggest integrating this into the watchlist page without making it more confusing?
- the extra term ('notifications') is clutter
I have no idea what you're referring to here. The preferences tab?
- please consider improving usability of the watchlist and integrating any
echo fields into it
- and make watchlist easier to manage
- integrate these two tools together
- echo is really conceptually merely a new channel where to pipe watchlist
items
We discussed this particular strategy quite extensively, but decided against it for reasons mentioned previously: much bigger project scope, politically contentious, not all notifications are about articles.
- simplicity is the key to success
Totally agree with that.
Ryan Kaldari
On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 10:20 PM, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
Hi,
Bartosz Dziewoński wrote:
tl;dr
-- Matma Rex
I tried for about an hour to summarize a concern. Can you truly not take a couple minutes to /read/ ?
svetlana
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Ryan Kaldari wrote:
svetlana wrote:
- the 'notifications' tab lacks a 'watchlist' column so that I can choose
where events go (email, echo's nagging, or watchlist passively)
The first part of this sentence is true, but like I said, notifications aren't necessarily tied to articles. Also the watchlist page is already extremely cluttered. How would you suggest integrating this into the watchlist page without making it more confusing?
It should be possible to filter it.
Ryan Kaldari wrote:
politically contentious,
Don't get that.
Ryan Kaldari wrote:
not all notifications are about articles.
They don't have to be.
I personally see a carefully designed (initially passive like it is now, but, if extended, configurable for email or web-echo-nagging modes) watchlist a better solution than saying "it sucks, let's invent a second better list". https://xkcd.com/927/
svetlana
Ryan Kaldari schreef op 2014/09/01 22:59:
- *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. When I leave someone a message on a talk page, chances are very good that message is something along the lines of "if you do that again, your account will be blocked until you agree to stop". I want to be certain that the message has been seen before proceeding to the obvious next step.
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.
KWW
- *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
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]
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29#Scope 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
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
Hey,
Wiadomość napisana przez Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org w dniu 5 wrz 2014, o godz. 02:00:
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.
Maybe mark unread messages somehow? Some vertical line on the right/left maybe?
Michał
On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 3:33 AM, Michał Łazowik mlazowik@me.com wrote:
Wiadomość napisana przez Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org w dniu 5 wrz 2014, o godz. 02:00:
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.
Maybe mark unread messages somehow? Some vertical line on the right/left maybe?
You mean like the way the "UserName and three others responded" notification of new posts on a topic highlights the new posts? (try it e.g. < https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:S12prb6trf24nhkz?fromnotif=1#flow-post-...
)
The "3 new topics on Talk:Sandbox" notification could do something similar, showing a vertical line next to the title bars of new posts.
We could add a "Highlight all posts newer than this" to each post's action menu, but it feels a bit esoteric. User JS or a gadget could easily do it.
Regards,
-- =S Page Features engineer
Kevin Wayne Williams wrote:
You use the past tense. I *still* clamor for the Orange Bar of Death. When I leave someone a message on a talk page, chances are very good that message is something along the lines of "if you do that again, your account will be blocked until you agree to stop". I want to be certain that the message has been seen before proceeding to the obvious next step.
Due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness, a tendency to use confusing jargon, and the fact that you'd often click to a diff rather than a formatted and focused view of the message itself, I imagine many people didn't properly receive, much less acknowledge, your messages.
Having a notification that users are required to manually acknowledge prior to being able to continue to edit might be an idea worth considering (though it feels very manipulative and coercive to me). There are other potential solutions to consider as well, but we really shouldn't pretend as though the anxiety-producing orange bar of death was some kind of gift from God. I think we can do better. :-)
In Echo, we should address the blaring red Echo number soon. For users who have opted in to link addition notifications, for example, the current level of URGENCY in the coloring is disproportionate and excessive.
Related discussions:
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55359 * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56476 * https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59185
When I hop around mediawiki.org currently, I'm being incessantly poked in the eye by a very bright "61" because I had the audacity to watch a talk page. Clearly this is broken. Of course I also have the string "new messages (2,312)" from LiquidThreads rewritten as "noise" using per-user JavaScript, so at this point I'm just continuing to pray that the Flow team has made a best effort to learn from past mistakes.
MZMcBride
A "blocking message" could be a tool for sysops/patrollers/whatelse, in my experience as a local sysop I often had to block people for 15 minutes with reason "please read [link to talkpage]".
Vito
Inviato con AquaMail per Android http://www.aqua-mail.com
Il 03 settembre 2014 05:25:34 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com ha scritto:
Kevin Wayne Williams wrote:
You use the past tense. I *still* clamor for the Orange Bar of Death. When I leave someone a message on a talk page, chances are very good that message is something along the lines of "if you do that again, your account will be blocked until you agree to stop". I want to be certain that the message has been seen before proceeding to the obvious next step.
Due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness, a tendency to use confusing jargon, and the fact that you'd often click to a diff rather than a formatted and focused view of the message itself, I imagine many people didn't properly receive, much less acknowledge, your messages.
Having a notification that users are required to manually acknowledge prior to being able to continue to edit might be an idea worth considering (though it feels very manipulative and coercive to me). There are other potential solutions to consider as well, but we really shouldn't pretend as though the anxiety-producing orange bar of death was some kind of gift from God. I think we can do better. :-)
In Echo, we should address the blaring red Echo number soon. For users who have opted in to link addition notifications, for example, the current level of URGENCY in the coloring is disproportionate and excessive.
Related discussions:
- https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55359
- https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56476
- https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59185
When I hop around mediawiki.org currently, I'm being incessantly poked in the eye by a very bright "61" because I had the audacity to watch a talk page. Clearly this is broken. Of course I also have the string "new messages (2,312)" from LiquidThreads rewritten as "noise" using per-user JavaScript, so at this point I'm just continuing to pray that the Flow team has made a best effort to learn from past mistakes.
MZMcBride
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On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 1:25 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
When I hop around mediawiki.org currently, I'm being incessantly poked in the eye by a very bright "61" because I had the audacity to watch a talk page. Clearly this is broken. Of course I also have the string "new messages (2,312)" from LiquidThreads rewritten as "noise" using per-user JavaScript, so at this point I'm just continuing to pray that the Flow team has made a best effort to learn from past mistakes.
Mine is 52 and "New messages (1,826)", which turns me off looking at either.
The UI under the "52" doesnt show me 52 notifications - it shows me about 20. It includes a "mark all as read" link, but I cant guess whether that will mark the ~20 as read (which would be good, as they are all Talk:Flow), or all 52, including the 32 I cant see (which would be bad as an important/interesting notification could be in the other ~32).
I dont mind 1,826 new messages as much, but would love [[Special:NewMessages]] to first let me pick which threads I want to read or mark as read based on only the thread page and 'section' name.
Some opinions as a relatively happy Flow user seeing room for improvement. Just picking Svetlana's first point:
On Monday, September 1, 2014, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
- *it* *doesn't* *scale* (constantly seeing a "(3)" or new emails pop up
if you're active in ~6 discussions is a pain)
Yes, this might become a problem. I don't think we need to change the principle, though. Most users are not active in six discussions at a time. Let's look at how things could be improved for the very active (and therefore very important) group that do.
Flow already supports unsubscribing from a single thread, which is a feature traditional Talk pages don't have and I'm finding very useful. You get less notifications, and definitely less notifications not interesting to you.
Currently Flow subscribes you automatically to any new thread created in a page you watch. Maybe there could be a preference to send you notifications only when new threads are created? Then it would be up to you to subscribe to a thread or not.
Also, Flow makes evident a problem that was more subtile in traditional Talk pages: maybe I want to watch a page for changes, but this doesn't necessarily mean that I'm interested in related user discussions. Would this workflow make sense?
1. User watches a page; the related Talk page is automatically watched as well. 2. If the user unwatches the Talk page (clicks big green Flow star at the top, turning it white) then the user doesn't receive more notifications for discussions, but still will watch the article itself.
Most LiquidThreads users already know how easy is to end up with +100 notifications waiting for your attention, which in practice means that you stop paying attention to them altogether. This is bad, and we shouldn't allow Flow to go down that same road. It's not a problem needing a redesign, "just" good fine tuning.
Most users are not active in six discussions at a time.
But some are active in dozens... I too have felt an 'overload' with the recent Flow integration in Echo on mw.org. And my assessment here is... someone confused a watchlist (a place where I go to get informed), with notifications and used one functional control for the both of them in Flow.
When I watch a talk page, that doesn't mean I want to be NOTIFIED of everything on every page. It's just not manageable that way. They are distinct use cases and someone is trying to design one of them away, not considering that it might be good to have them separated. Back to the drawing board on that part, I say. Instead of looking how to bring the watch list into Echo, think, how can we bring them together.
DJ
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 8:51 AM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
Some opinions as a relatively happy Flow user seeing room for improvement. Just picking Svetlana's first point:
On Monday, September 1, 2014, svetlana svetlana@fastmail.com.au wrote:
- *it* *doesn't* *scale* (constantly seeing a "(3)" or new emails pop up
if you're active in ~6 discussions is a pain)
Yes, this might become a problem. I don't think we need to change the principle, though. Most users are not active in six discussions at a time. Let's look at how things could be improved for the very active (and therefore very important) group that do.
Flow already supports unsubscribing from a single thread, which is a feature traditional Talk pages don't have and I'm finding very useful. You get less notifications, and definitely less notifications not interesting to you.
Currently Flow subscribes you automatically to any new thread created in a page you watch. Maybe there could be a preference to send you notifications only when new threads are created? Then it would be up to you to subscribe to a thread or not.
Also, Flow makes evident a problem that was more subtile in traditional Talk pages: maybe I want to watch a page for changes, but this doesn't necessarily mean that I'm interested in related user discussions. Would this workflow make sense?
- User watches a page; the related Talk page is automatically watched as
well. 2. If the user unwatches the Talk page (clicks big green Flow star at the top, turning it white) then the user doesn't receive more notifications for discussions, but still will watch the article itself.
Most LiquidThreads users already know how easy is to end up with +100 notifications waiting for your attention, which in practice means that you stop paying attention to them altogether. This is bad, and we shouldn't allow Flow to go down that same road. It's not a problem needing a redesign, "just" good fine tuning.
-- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 09/02/2014 07:47 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote:
When I watch a talk page, that doesn't mean I want to be NOTIFIED of everything on every page.
Wouldn't simply turning off flow notifications do? Or, perhaps more flexibly, just making the setting more granular?
I know /I/'d like to be notified of direct replies and pings without having a notification for every update to a thread -- that does seem more suited for a passive watchlist.
-- Marc
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 09/02/2014 07:47 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote:
When I watch a talk page, that doesn't mean I want to be NOTIFIED of everything on every page.
Wouldn't simply turning off flow notifications do? Or, perhaps more flexibly, just making the setting more granular?
I know /I/'d like to be notified of direct replies and pings without having a notification for every update to a thread -- that does seem more suited for a passive watch list.
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...
DJ
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