Notifications

Notifications (also known as Echo) is an engagement tool for Wikimedia and MediaWiki sites to inform users about new activity in a unified way. It provides notifications to users of various events related to their account, including new talk page messages, edit reverts, mentions, or links. It is designed to replace and/or augment existing notification systems on MediaWiki sites, as well as provide significantly more control to users as to how their notifications are handled, read, and deleted. The feature was initially developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Editor Engagement team as part of "MediaWiki needs a sane notification system" (T34281), and is currently the responsibility of the Collaboration team. It was deployed to all Wikimedia wikis during 2013.

See Help:Notifications for the user-guide.

January 2016
The difference between "alerts" and "messages" notifications (the two panels or flyouts) is unclear to some. The developers want feedback at the Phabricator task or on MediaWiki.org so they can make this better (T123018). You can give feedback in your language if you prefer not to use English.

The ongoing user-experience changes (the wording and design of each notification type) are most easily seen in this spreadsheet (or less detailed version at Notifications/Messages). More details at T114357.

Cross-wiki notifications are alive on Beta wikis (T123570)

November 2015
The Collaboration team is concentrating on cross-wiki notifications and related improvements to the extension. A Beta Feature for cross-wiki notifications is planned.

A more detailed overview is available on the talkpage; here are the main tasks:
 * Technical details: Requests for comment/Cross-wiki notifications and back-end improvements: T107823 (Rewrite EchoNotificationFormatter)
 * T117670 (Define Cross-wiki Notifications settings)
 * T114356 (Bundled notifications)
 * T114237 (Present cross-wiki notifications as a beta feature to users)
 * T114357 (Clarifications to the currently confusing "primary/secondary" link, and proposed future enhancements)
 * T115264 (Controlling notification 'volume' based on the type or location)
 * T115845 (Clearer use of the notification badges (coloured number in personal toolbar))
 * T115316 (Better organization of the Special:Notifications page)
 * T114350 (Cross-wiki notifications tracking task)
 * Note: Most of these are not directly part of the cross-wiki notifications feature. We won't for sure roll all these out together with the main change.

What comments, what design ideas, and what technical concerns do you have? Please tell us on the linked tasks if you can.

September 2015
The notifications badge has been split in two. As a first step, notifications about messages on your user talk page will be placed in the second badge/list (and messages on the wikis using it). Please give us feedback on which of the other existing notifications, should be moved into the second badge/list.

See also below.

Goals




This new notifications system seeks to unify the delivery of interaction messages in MediaWiki core, through a common API that can provide a uniform interface for users. For a quick visual overview of this project, check the Notifications slides.

Problems and Solutions
We aimed to solve these core problems:
 * There is no central notification system on MediaWiki sites
 * The current ad-hoc approach is inefficient
 * Users are not notified of key events
 * Users are confused by current notices

Notifications was developed to provide these solutions:
 * Provide a unified user experience
 * Inform users of important activity
 * Promote editor engagement

User groups
Notifications will support several different user groups:
 * new users (after registration)
 * current users

The first release focused on new users, who need notifications more than power users. Specifically, we concentrated on some of the first notifications which a new user can receive after creating an account on Wikipedia. We also developed some features to support power users, but we initially emphasize notifications that can engage new users, who need this service most urgently. Anonymous, unregistered users will not receive notifications at this time.

Features
Here are the features in the current version, as of September 2015.


 * 1. Features:
 * Badge
 * Flyout
 * Archive
 * Email notifications
 * Preferences
 * Bundling
 * 'Mark all as read'


 * 2. Default notification types:
 * Talk page message
 * post on your user talkpage
 * Mention
 * mention on another page
 * Page link
 * link to a page you started
 * Edit revert
 * edit undone
 * edit rolled back
 * System messages
 * your user rights have changed
 * welcome
 * emailuser


 * 3. Notification types from other extensions
 * Thanks
 * edit-thank
 * flow-thank
 * Flow
 * flow-new-topic
 * flow-post-reply
 * flow-post-edited
 * flow-topic-renamed
 * flow-mention
 * flow-enabled-on-talkpage
 * PageTriage
 * review of a page you started
 * review with maintenance tags
 * review with deletion tags
 * EducationProgram
 * course talkpage edited
 * user rights have changed (1 each for: student / instructor / campus volunteer / online volunteer)
 * OpenStackManager
 * instance built
 * instance deleted
 * instance reboot completed
 * you were added to a project
 * ContentTranslation
 * cx-first-translation
 * cx-tenth-translation
 * cx-hundredth-translation
 * Gather
 * gather-hide
 * gather-unhide
 * gather-approve
 * BounceHandler
 * unsubscribe-bouncehandler
 * Newsletter
 * subscribe-newsletter

For more details, read the old feature requirements.

Suggested new notification types
These new types of notifications have been proposed, or partially developed (in no particular order):
 * cross-wiki notifications (T67661)
 * Extension:Newsletter notifications (tag/newsletter)
 * Notification: Your file was used (T77154)
 * Sitewide notifications through Echo (T58361)
 * Allow users to create custom notifications onwiki (T58362)
 * Override user-talk Echo notification with something more MassMessage-specific (T59234)
 * Notify user when username used in an edit summary (T32750)
 * notifications about your revision being approved or rejected on wikis with FlaggedRevs enabled (T54510)
 * Notify someone that an abusefilter had a sudden increase in the number of logs (T100892)
 * Notifications from functionaries to users for when email isn't available (T112142)
 * User rights/groups/status
 * Notification when user becomes auto-confirmed (T54690)
 * Notification when account is blocked (T100974)
 * global account rights change (T53541)
 * User page/User talkpage
 * notification when someone else edits your userpage (T3876)
 * Extend edit-user-talk notification to include edits to subpages of a user's talk page (T5234)
 * Flow
 * "Topic has been hidden" Echo notification (T89179)
 * user-email
 * notification (asking users to consider providing an email) to users who don't have an e-mail address associated with their account (T58028)
 * Remind users who have entered an email address, but haven't confirmed it (T58074)
 * Page-link
 * notifications when a redirect is converted into a non-redirect (T56533)
 * Allow "article-linked" notifications for pages in a user defined list (T66090)
 * notification when watched page gets linked (T106991)
 * notifications when a page created by the user is deleted (T56532)
 * Notify that your article has been translated by another user (T88581)
 * notification when page is being connected to Wikidata (T110604)
 * OAuth
 * Add notification to inform oauthadmins that a new consumer request is waiting (T61772)
 * Notify owners when an OAuthapp changes state (T62528)

Related documents

 * Extension:Echo (with installation instructions)
 * Phabricator: Workboard (See also tag/collaboration-team-current)
 * m:Schema:Echo
 * Metrics Dashboards: E.g. en, es, it, pt (many metrics were collected for a short time. Some are still ongoing, and some are new at specific wikis.)
 * Notifications Short List (work in progress)
 * Notifications - Best Practices research from other websites