We are concerned that users may not be able to find important notifications like talk page messages (particularly if they have a long list of notifications).
To that end, consider adding filters on the notifications archive page, that would let you:
- view all notifications (the current approach)
- view only talk page messages (the most important category)
- view other categories (if it's easy to do)
Vibha will investigate design solutions for this proposed feature, and we will review them as a team, then write up more definitive requirements based on that discussion.
Note that according to Benny, the existing database structure would not provide efficient support for Archive filters, because the lookup for archive page or flyout is mainly done on the notification table which doesn't have any idea about the event_type ( talk page, mention etc ).
We may need to move that information from the event table to notification table for fast lookup, and depending on how long we keep the notification records, the data volume matters. In either case, this would involve a meeting with Asher/Aaron to go over the implementation details.
For all these reasons, this is a medium priority at this time, but we should be prepared to move quickly on this, in case en-wiki users request it. So having a good design in place would be invaluable, as well as a preliminary discussion with Asher/Aaron, even if we don't have time to develop this right away.
The current notifications archive page can be viewed here on MediaWiki:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Notifications
Its current feature requirements are outlined here, and will be updated based on our discussions:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#All_notifications
See Also:
T48692: Can't hide items on Special:Notifications
T63919: Allow marking echo events as 'archived'