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(a)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(a)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.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
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