On 10 September 2014 17:47, Martijn Hoekstra
I think this is something of an oops, and not really
something we should
judge the product on. Currently the broken mess is "notify on all posts on
all threads on the page", which should be "notify on all posts on the
subscribed thread, and possible on new threads on the watched page."
The feature shouldn't be "notify on all posts on the subscribed
thread" either. I don't want to be notified every time a new thread
appears at any one of my watched pages. I have about 3000 pages in my
watchlist, and receive around 400 updates daily only from talk pages,
which 50 or so come from unique pages; getting all those as
notifications would render Echo useless to me. Apparently this volume
of data was not taken into account when designing the notification
feature that was rolled out this week, and it is still ignored in the
redesign proposals that I've seen at the various forums.
We have suggested a couple of times at en:Talk:Flow that notifications
should come only from pages/topics/boards where the user has
subscribed to, AND has explicitly enabled notifications, so that only
a subset of preferred pages will alert the user - the rest of
low-importance ones should be actively looked for at the Watchlist.
However, it's hard to tell whether such suggestions ever reach the
development team; it's clear that this one need didn't arrive in time
to be taken into account before the release.
Everybody acknowledges the former is a mistake and
stuff like that can
happen in testing.
This is not testing, this was rolled out to the production
environment. The release has been interfering with the work of those
editors who happen to have participated in any Flow page. This is more
than an "oops", it's affecting the mission. Why is experimentation
still being released to all editors, instead of limiting it to those
willing to participate in it?