The WMF core features team tracks this bug on Mingle card https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/flow/cards/396, but people from the community are welcome to contribute here and in Gerrit.

This is probably a bad idea and not something we will want to implement.

Notifications are a super-set; displaying them based on granularity creates an N+ display problem (ever-increasing interface clutter).

Notifications are not intended to be anything more than transient. This works against that.

Recommending CLOSE: WONTFIX, as it defeats the function of the product.

What a rude and ill-informed comment.

Nothing in my proposal to which Quiddity referred suggested making notifications non-transient.

I regret that you took my comment as "rude". That was not its intended direction; however, I stand by everything I said.

As to your "ill-informed" bit, I can only say that I was the principle designer for the Echo feature, so I should think I have a fair grasp as to what it is and is not intended to do.

Your proposal will, indeed, bring notifications into a "non-transient" state because it will elevate (or lower) certain notification *types* in importance. Segregating notifications based on type creates importance disparity. A key feature of any notifications system is neutrality. Non-neutral systems are not transient. Ergo, my statement (which is correct).

I should have slept on it rather than dashing off a reply last thing at night. I was somewhat taken aback by what I perceived as your tone. Ill-informed was a poor choice of word on my part.

I get the impression that you think I'm suggesting splitting the notifications into individually clickable items. That's not what I meant at all. This proposal is only to change the clickable component from displaying a single aggregate count to displaying a count separated into types. The behavior on clicking would not change at all; a click received anywhere on the display would trigger the menu and reset it to 0, just as at present. Does that make sense?

Slightly relevant is https://trello.com/c/4Hs9ShSm/438-e-2-separate-notifications-panel-into-messages-and-alerts-13 and https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/148563/

turingt wrote:

(In reply to Brandon Harris from comment #4)

Your proposal will, indeed, bring notifications into a "non-transient" state
because it will elevate (or lower) certain notification *types* in
importance. Segregating notifications based on type creates importance
disparity. A key feature of any notifications system is neutrality.

Brandon, that would be fine if all notifications had the same importance, but that is no longer true. Now that Flow is connected to Echo, there are high importance notifications (alerts) and low importance (messages).

When the bubble lights up, I'd want to know, without having to open it first, whether it contains some alerts to read it right now (when someone replies to my talk or pings me), or just messages to a topics I'm subscribed to, so that I can leave it unread for a while. For that, the bubble should light up with different styles if it contains alerts or not.

Another option is to allow the user to choose what messages (i.e. from what boards) are important enough to raise a notification, instead of all messages raising one. This way there would be no difference of importance.

This is kind of being brainstormed in T108190: Split notifications into Alerts and Messages.