Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Notifications/Notifications should be able to display all cross-wiki notifications, whatever their status

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Notifications should be able to display all cross-wiki notifications, whatever their status

  • Problem: I can't seem to see my cross-wiki notifications unless I have unread notifications on that wiki. So I wind up keeping unread notifications around to avoid losing the ability to refer to the notifications I have already read.

    Example: I get lots of en-wiki notifications, but rarely anything from the nl-wiki. Someone notifies me from nl, and I read it but have no time to respond. A day later I go to my notifications list and cannot find any way to access that read nl-wiki notification. If I get a second nl-wiki notification, I can go to that, select "all" or "unread", and see my first nl-wiki notification, but I'd better remember to leave at least one of the messages flagged as unread if I don't want to lose access again. If I remember that the vanished notification was on nl-wiki, I could go to the nl-wiki, then check my notifications there, but with half-a-dozen possible wikis, this can quickly become tedious.

    Because I am active on a fair number of wikis, and keep unread notifications around, my "Recent Activity" list stretches well off the bottom of the screen. As I often deal with new notifications at the top of the page without scrolling down and clicking on and checking through eight or nine wikis, I've managed to miss seeing cross-wiki notifications for months, which is careless and unkind of me when someone is awaiting a reply. I suspect I would be more active across wikis if this were easier.

  • Who would benefit: Anyone active across wikis who does not always deal with all of their notifications immediately.
  • Proposed solution: Some sort of access to cross-wiki read notifications in the interface, not mandatory but configurable by individual editors (clarified 20:10, 17 November).
  • More comments:

Discussion

I like the idea. Gryllida 22:22, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea, but at the same time I feel that it may pile up a lot of notifications. It may be wanted by some, but also annoying for others at the same time. So I suggest that the feature to be developed, and the choice is left to individual users according their "Preferences". Another option is to create a "Special:" page which displays all the notifications/messages from all the Wikis, with an option to select the time-frame, include/exclude projects etc. The user who wishes to check, will use the Special page. KCVelaga (talk) 11:09, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm very happy with the idea of user control. I'd favour leaning towards "I don't want to miss anything" by default, with configuration to move it towards "I don't want clutter", as new users will get few notifications and are less familiar with configuration. If the config is in the GUI this is less of a problem. There are lots of ways to implement this, and an "Other wikis" link would suffice to give access to wikis with no unread notifications, so it certainly could be done without significant clutter. Only the last 200 notifications are kept; configuration of expiry dates etc. as suggested might be preferable. HLHJ (talk) 06:36, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you, 1997kB, I wasn't aware of that script. Despite the "This is a quick and dirty script — it's not ready for reuse!" this is really useful technical information. I agree configurability is a must, and as it has now come up twice, have made a small underlined mod to the proposal for clarification. I'd welcome comments on whether people would prefer an opt-in or an opt-out, and what form they would like it to take. I'd personally prefer a GUI-button opt-out, for reasons given above, but a self-customized Special page as suggested by KCVelaga might also be a good option. We might want one configuration method for newbies, and another for power users. HLHJ (talk) 20:11, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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