Hi all, I just got a "new message" banner for vandalism by someone else. Now, I'm an irregular but longtime contributor, and I do understand what is going on here, and it doesn't bother me. I do also understand that shared IP address messages are necessarily going to be difficult to deliver. But it does occur to me that this would confuse most people, and we can do better.
So may I suggest that if an unregistered user has not performed an edit during their session, then the "new message" banner ought not to be shown. A "new message" banner would not be displayed unless and until someone tries to make an edit (or logs in). The rationale is:
most users are simply reading Wikipedia, the messages is certainly not to them, and there is no reason to trouble or confuse them. the message will be delivered to someone actually making an edit, so the chances of reaching the right user on a shared IP are actually much increased, this seems like a small change (but granted I don't know the Wiki internals), the only way a message notification could go undelivered this way is if no user makes any further unregistered edit from that IP address, but that seems like no big loss.
My 2 cents for today. You're welcome, Wikipedia :-) -
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement