Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Archive/Make individual threads watchable

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Make individual threads watchable

  • Problem: Cannot easily discover when someone has posted to an individual thread.
  • Who would benefit:
  • Proposed solution: The ability to "watch" individual talk page or forum threads, and receive notifications when people post to those threads, is required for use on forum pages with many active threads, such as the month-by-month sub-pages of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Tea_room, for example. The way it presently works is hopeless. If, like me, you participate in multiple threads over a period of time, there is apparently at the moment no feasible way of discovering when someone has posted a reply to a specific thread (unless the poster explicitly "pings" you, which usually does not happen), short of checking each one individually, which is clearly infeasible on a regular basis, or subscribing to the whole page and being deluged with irrelevant notifications.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Mihia (talk) 21:52, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

For the records, mw:Extension:StructuredDiscussions (which is deployed on some wikis) offers this functionality. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 00:26, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Mihia, I have good news and bad news about this proposal. :) The good news is that the Wikimedia Foundation is starting the planning process for a big global Talk pages consultation which will begin in February. The idea is that we need to step back from LiquidThreads and Flow, and start over with a totally public and transparent consultation. We want to bring together as many people as possible, and come to consensus on the problems with talk pages that we want to solve, the good things about talk pages that we want to keep, and the tradeoffs involved in finding a solution that will work for new and experienced editors. You can read a lot more about it on that project page that I linked. The planning has just started, and we're starting to talk about the structure for this consultation and how it's going to work.

The bad news for right now is that we don't want to include proposals about talk pages in the Wishlist Survey voting. No matter what happens in the Wishlist Survey voting, all of the future talk page work will be determined by the Talk pages consultation happening next year. We don't want people to vote for something, and then find out that we still have to have another process before we make any decisions.

But -- these proposals and the discussions that people are having here are important, and I've added a section on the Talk pages consultation page which lists each of the related proposals, so that they can be a part of the public record during this planning stage. We'd like to include you in the consultation -- and in the planning, if you're interested. There's a lot to talk about and figure out.

I'm sure this will be disappointing right now; I hope it's also heartening to know that this problem will get a lot of attention next year. Let me know what you think. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@DannyH (WMF): Thanks, I understand. Certainly, if I can make any useful comments on the new proposals, in respect of this issue (or indeed others), then I would be most happy to do so. Thanks again for your very clear and comprehensive reply. Mihia (talk) 21:10, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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