The new system of watching Flow pages, where all new topics are added to one's watchlist individually, results in an infinitely expanding watchlist. Every time a new topic is added to a page you are watching, a new entry is added to the watchlist. Just in the few days since this change went live, I have amassed about 30 new watchlist entries in the topic namespace, and I don't have that many Flow pages on my watchlist. Over time, this is likely to cause issues, especially for people with many pages on their watchlist. (As a side note, it is hard to deal with Flow pages in Special:EditWatchlist because they show up with just their codes, making you click on each one to see if you want to keep it.)
Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions
Yeah, the fact that these names are meaningless makes it very hard to clean up my watchlist.
Yeah, we're going to have to retune the way subscribing to a board works. There were two possible definitions of what "subscribing to a Flow board" would mean -- a) You get an Echo notification that a new topic has been created, or b) You get automatically subscribed to every new topic created on the board.
Basically, a) works better for people who look at Echo more than their watchlist, and b) works better for people who look at their watchlist more than Echo. We needed to try one of them and see how it feels, so we opted for the version that was more watchlist-focused.
Over the last couple days, I think we've heard clear feedback that b) feels too much like spam. So I'm going to talk about it with the team, and we'll hash out the details to switch to the a) approach. Thanks for posting your thoughts; it makes a big difference.
@DannyH (WMF): What about option c) that was commented at en:Talk:Flow? Allow the editor to select which boards or topics should generate a notification, and which should have silent updates (so that the user has to be actively search for them at the Watchlist).
I would love to have a small selection of a few talk pages for which I get a notification every time they are updated, even if they're posts to existing topics, but that would be overwhelming if I get an alert for new topics at *all* the talk pages/boards to which I'm subscribed.
Yeah, I think we're going to need to provide more options. (When Nick reads this, he's going to say "Yessss!" because he loves options.)
We released a version of the new notifications, because we wanted to get feedback once people were actually using it for real conversations, not just from team members on test pages. The feedback that we've had has been surprisingly varied -- some people see Echo notifications as requiring immediate notice, and getting more will be a big distraction, and other people don't pay attention to Echo at all, and only want to see things on their watchlist. And even then, there are differences between what and how much people want to see on their watchlist or Echo.
So -- right now, it looks like we're going to have to come up with a more sophisticated system, which gives people more choice about what and how much they want to see. Having a bunch more options in Preferences is always possible, but I'd like to see if we can build the choice into the UI, in a way that feels powerful and not intrusive.
This is a very tricky thing to build -- but that's the tricky thing that we have to build. We'll keep talking about it and asking questions about it.
If you take a look at how discussions on Village Pump of Portuguese Wikipedia works (topic subpages transcluded in a main page), you'll notice the following: users who watch e.g. https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Esplanada/geral will see the edit which creates new topics appear in their watchlist, but edits to the subpages of those topics will not appear in their watchlist unless they choose to watch the specific topic. This works well as a workaround for the "watch a section" feature (bug 738) and avoid cluttering the watchlist with edits from very active topics we are not interested in.
Yes, that is what Flow will have now/very soon. You can watch the specific topics that you're subscribed to, and you won't see the conversations that you're not interested in. We're going to make a change within a couple of weeks that makes subscribing to a Flow board work the way that you described -- you'll get a notification when new topics are created.