Talk:Notifications/2014

Create a notification for all users

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T58361

Hello, i own a private Wiki and have a question for you guys: is it actually possible for admins/bureaucrats to create individual notifications that reach all users? This would be a nice feature to inform the community about the important stuff goin' on (like important discussions, new guidelines, elections etc.) regards, genjack GenJack 16:44, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

No, it isn't. Such a feature has been developed as Extension:MassMessage, which doesn't use Echo yet because Echo has never figured out a way to be integrated with other stuff. Nemo 09:44, 27 April 2014 (UTC)

What you want is currently tracked as bugzilla:56361. Legoktm (talk) 05:36, 28 April 2014 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea. I'd love to be able to get messages to only groups of users, as well, like "To all admins, the deletion policy has changed significantly" (or whatever that particular community believes is appropriate to announce). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:50, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

How to insert a JS hook after mw-echo-overlay?

There are no problems with running a personal script after downloading of the dedicated Special:Notifications page, but I do not know how to do it after downloading of the notifications popup as

<div style="display: block;" class="mw-echo-overlay"> </div>

It seems to me that hooks added with jQuery(document).ready(…) are not called then. There are docs at http://api.jquery.com/ but I am not a DHTML expert and can’t find easily the thing I need. Suggestions? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 12:24, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

To clarify, are you trying to run some JavaScript after the flyout is shown? I don't think there is currently a way to do that, but we can add a hook point if you have a use-case for it. Legoktm (talk) 17:51, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Yes,

I’m trying to run some JavaScript after "mw-echo-overlay" is shown. Of course, I have not access to the MediaWiki installation (it is Wikipedia). Incnis Mrsi (talk) 05:03, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Ok, turns out a hook for this already exists.

mw.hook('ext.echo.overlay.beforeShowingOverlay').add( function( $overlay ) {
// javascript you want to run
} );

Legoktm (talk) 21:30, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you much, this hook is exactly what I needed for my notifications’ processor at ru:Участник:Incnis Mrsi/неОбсуждение участника.js. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 09:40, 25 May 2014 (UTC)

JavaScript API

Is there a JS API to add notifications? I'm maintaining a gadget that shows a message in my personal bar if there are any articles in a speedy deletion candidate category. It would be great if it could use Echo to show a notification instead. Is that possible? Danmichaelo (talk) 08:54, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

No. Nemo 12:37, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

Related: Topic tagging with Flow --Gryllida 07:31, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Colours of "Messages" and "Alerts" tabs

Using web browsers for quite some time, I grew accustomed to having blue colour mean "I can click on this" and gray to mean "I cannot click on this". But here, it is precisely the opposite. I spent half a minute frantically clicking "Messages" to read the notification before it occurred to me to click on the other link. Who is responsible for this idiocy? — Keφr 15:21, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I filed that as bugzilla:69929. I'll check to see what the status is. Thanks for the nudge. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Also, when I get a notification on the "Alerts" tab, the "Alerts" tab should show up by default after clicking the notification button. No-brainer, really. Right now it always shows "Messages" by default. — Keφr 17:56, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

That's bugzilla:70461 and was fixed today :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 04:57, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Good to see. Though as for bugzilla:69929#c2, I would prefer something more traditional...

— Keφr 12:30, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

More than 2,000 Notifications, will start to be removed

July 2019: T227853 is open in order to see which notifications shoudn't be deleted.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/159413/ - This update adds a script to delete any Notifications that are older than the most recent 2,000.

Up until now, they were stored indefinitely, meaning that some users have many thousands of read Notifications adding up in the database. 2,000 was chosen, because it is the number of Notifications that the "mark all as read" button effects. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:09, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

This change is mainly intended to reduce a performance bottleneck.

It will also enable future separation (perhaps even filtering) of the different types of Notification. There's a tangential discussion about some feature-requests related to this, at en:WP:VPI#Can we have a color scheme for the notifications count, please, and, if not, perhaps some other color than red? currently. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

What if I want to preserve important notifications and delete the newest instead? Ricordisamoa 02:40, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

For indefinite preservation, I think the best option would probably be to enable the "email" preference for whichever notification types you want to keep records for.

Is there a particular type(s) of notifications that you're thinking of? Giving a few examples almost always helps. :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 02:57, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

I would have thought the number of users with > 2000 edits would be small. If you ware worried about database size, maybe deleted some of those millions of "users" who have never edited or been welcomed. Rich Farmbrough (talk) 17:04, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

This change was just regarding number of echo notifications, not edits. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:44, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that's not what I meant. Rich Farmbrough (talk) 07:50, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

How can one determine how many notifications one has?

Ottawahitech (talk) 21:16, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech, what do you mean? You want to know how many notifications someone has? Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:43, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_(pronoun) Rich Farmbrough (talk) 09:34, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

. Rich Farmbrough (talk) 09:34, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Ah, English language. :) Thank you Rich.

Ottawahitech, why do you need to know how many notification someone has? It is some private information. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 10:02, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

I want to know how many notifications I have at enwiki where I am indefinitely blocked since 2017 (I think), after almost ten years of contributions. I have not been able to participate (even my talk-page access has been removed), so there is no way for me to do things like thank people, etc.

I am still hoping that my indef block will be lifted someday, and I would like to keep my notifications at least until such time. Ottawahitech (talk) 15:06, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

He wants to know how many notifications he has. Rich Farmbrough (talk) 14:23, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

It is displayed on Special:Notifications for a given wiki. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 14:50, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Not on en:Wikipedia, as far as I can see. Rich Farmbrough (talk) 22:18, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

I see 52 for me: click on the arrows close to "1-50" to see the total.

This is not optimal, but we never had any feedback about displaying the total.

Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 21:24, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

Looks like some of my notifications have already been deleted then? Can they be recovered? Rich Farmbrough (talk) 07:50, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

No. They are removed from the database. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 09:17, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

I have no idea where to look for "arrows" and where "1-50" is supposed to be. I suspect this may look different to someone using a different platform. For example, is this viewable to someone using a [[w:mobile]], or someone using a [[w:linux]] system?

BTW, I pretty much gave up on anyone responding to my questions here on mediawiki. [[User:Quidity]] was always pretty prompt, but I think he is no longer involved?

Another BTW, since FLOW is being tested here: where can I provide feedback to the FLOW developers? Ottawahitech (talk) 15:19, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

AH.. so after 39 clicks I see that I have 1996 notifications... I would really rather they not be deleted, it seems contrary to the spirit of the WIki to loose history like this. By this principle we would delete page history over 2000, or maybe decide we could manage with the 2000 most important articles! :) Rich Farmbrough (talk) 07:35, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Is it possible to compare Notifications to Article history? I don't think it is.

Article history are a fundamental feature for the wikis: without them we wouldn't have the reliability we have.

Notifications are just tokens you immediately take action from. Did you had once to find something on the 1996 notifications you've received since 2013, apart from the 20 most recent ones? It is a real question, not some cynical rhetoric wording. :) Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 09:55, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Yes, in particular the number of thanks for fixing up reference names is an important metric. Keeping thanks is also important for understanding social issues. Having a list of mentions is useful if you can't find a discussion you were pinged in. Rich Farmbrough (talk) 16:04, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Makes sense. I've documented it. Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 09:07, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

I would have thought the number of users with > 2000 edits would be small. The number with > 2,000 echoes smaller still.

Rich Farmbrough 22:18, 13 August 2026 (UTC).
Rich Farmbrough (talk) 02:15, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

How come there is no response from the wmf employees? Ottawahitech (talk) 20:55, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Please... I do not see the word kilobyte here, so you really are just poking at this with a stick... And if you don't see why that is relevant, you should ''especially'' stop talking about what should be done about it! Apologies, RTG (talk) 18:32, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

I should just add my opinion. Never delete any notification ever without a genuine good reason. I have hundreds of notifications from the last year. I don't want someone to come along and delete them while I am off doing something even if they think I've seen them before, They're mine. Is that not fair? RTG (talk) 18:38, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

I agree. Please stop deleting information that is important for contributors. Please don't decide for me what is important and what is not! Ottawahitech (talk) 20:54, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Very very fair imio Ottawahitech (talk) 16:26, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

> Very very fair imio

This is a Flow comment: I have no idea why I wrote this and who I was responding to?????

... and to save others the hassle of trying to follow links, here is the link I ended up at explaining why Flow is no longer under development. It was written by Danny Horn and was dated 2015!

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-September/082993.html Ottawahitech (talk) 20:52, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

I now have a good example of where this has made my life difficult. An editor caused over 2000 notifications to my account, and this means everything previous has been wiped.

This is a seriously flawed idea. Rich Farmbrough (talk) 22:48, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Looks like there is least one more discussion forum for notifications at

Help talk:Notifications. Divide & conquer? Ottawahitech (talk) 02:24, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I have logged a security bug on Phabricator relating to this. Rich Farmbrough 10:49, 25 January 2025 (UTC). Rich Farmbrough (talk) 10:49, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

These are the Phabricator bugs I have logged on this matter. There are a few others.

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T227853 Don't delete notifications
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T367755 Please restore the notifications I asked you not to delete
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T367754 Security issue

Rich Farmbrough 11:12, 25 January 2025 (UTC). Rich Farmbrough (talk) 11:12, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Mentions require signature with timestamp?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T75426

Mention depends on message tracking, which is hacky and muddy (checks timestamps and other criteria) and is contantly being worked on for several bugs.

I've been testing this out on our corporate wiki (currently MW 1.23.2). It seems like for a mention to work, it has to include the wiki-link to the user page I'm mentioning followed by a wiki link to my user page AND a timestamp. Is that correct? I'm curious if it would be possible to make use of the functions that determine who made an edit and when (like what is used for the Recent Changes page) instead of relying on a signature. In my tests, even if I use both usernames in links (the "to" and "from"), but don't include a timestamp, it seems to not be recognized by Echo as a mention event. Darenwelsh (talk) 17:54, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it's correct. There are also other checks, for instance if you remove a line then it's not considered a message so the mention doesn't go out. Nemo 20:45, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Could you explain the reasoning behind using the link to user page and timestamp in the signature instead of the methods that are used to create Recent Changes? Darenwelsh (talk) 21:21, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

What are "the methods that are used to create Recent Changes"? Nemo 22:29, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

My point is that for every page revision, there is a record of who made the revision and when it happened. So why not use that information instead of relying on the signature? The way that it is working now, if your signature doesn't include a link to your user page, it doesn't work. Darenwelsh (talk) 22:51, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

The signature is "only" used to (help) determine whether an edit is a new message or not. The extension checks the edit in the moment it's saved, it doesn't parse the whole talk page looking for new messages if this is what you were "afraid" of.

This was decided in the specifications: Echo_(Notifications)/Feature_requirements#User Mention (I didn't make them). Nemo 07:46, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

I understand that the four tildes which generate the signature are used to signify that the revision is meant to be recognized by Echo as a notification. I could see how a user might want to correct a typo and would not want that showing up as a notification. I'm sure it could be overwhelming if every edit on that discussion page showed up as a notification.

That said, when you rely on using four tildes for this feature, it seems to require that the user's signature include a link to their user page. But if someone using MediaWiki with Echo chooses to use a signature that does not link to their user page, then Echo will not recognize those edits for notifications. An example of this: A user on SemanticMediawiki.org might set their signature to link to their user page on Mediawiki.org.

Similarly, I don't see why Echo requires a timestamp in the edit to qualify for notification. When the page is saved, the revision table is appended with an entry including rev_timestamp and rev_user. Why not just use that?

Why not just determine some minimum criteria based on number of characters added to the page or use some set of regular expressions to test that it was not just a typo correction? Darenwelsh (talk) 14:36, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

I believe the reason it checks for a tilde-generated signature and timestamp, are to avoid accidental pings during section-archives, or other types of thread-refactoring, e.g. here I moved a single thread to my talkpage archive.

I'll ask if the devs there were any other rationales for relying upon this trigger. [Edit: Confirmed. That is/was the main reason.]

Thanks Nemo, I didn't know about the no-line-removal criteria. I've added that to the Notes at Echo (Notifications)/Feature requirements#User Mention. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 18 November 2014 (UTC)