On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Konstantinos Stampoulis geraki@geraki.gr wrote:
2013/10/29 Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org
How would you suggest we tackle this problem?
Echo can be a good alternative. Imagine a new notification for every user, a "global notice" (not a talk page message) This can be sent to registered users, with its own icon, a notification message with text simillar to what it would be included in a banner, and linking to the relevant page (instead of own talk page etc). So, every user will get it only once, but he can go back to it by clicking the notifications icon.
mockup: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Echo-centralnotice.png
Yes, that could be a great idea, in particular when combined with some kind of topic-specific opt-in and opt-out.
There has been quite a bit of thinking about technical solutions to this kind of problem, including hope that Echo and/or Flow could play a role in them. See e.g. the material at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Movement_broadcasting , in particular the linked Wikimania presentations from this year (by Andrew Gray) and last year (by myself).