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