Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Automatic notification when there is a response on a talk page

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Automatic notification when there is a response on a talk page

N Outside the scope of Community Tech

• Problem: One has to manually check whether talk page discussion have received responses, which can sometimes take weeks or longer.
• Who would benefit: Editors engaging in talk page discussions.
• Proposed solution: An option for a notification when a talk page on your watchlist gets edited.
• More comments: It can be either an option for certain watchlist pages like noted above, or a special kind of watchlist (a 'follow discussion' option or something like that) which sends notifications. If it's the latter, then it could actually be extended to the articles themselves, as well.
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: Keepcalmandchill (talk) 04:35, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

• Good idea. This functionality is partially implemented by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Enterprisey/reply-link . Check it out. (At the very least, such tools should be advertised in the Preferences/Gadgets, which right now does not include most of them, see my proposal in gadgets for dealing with that problem). --Piotrus (talk) 04:56, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  Cheers for that! Keepcalmandchill (talk) 05:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

• There is the talk pages project which might have this in its scope. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 10:29, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  I checked, it's not in the current projects. Keepcalmandchill (talk) 11:00, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

  I got the impression the talk pages project will address this from my public conversations with the team. As this proposal was declined, your feedback could still be valuable there. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 11:18, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

• This is what Structured Discussions (formerly known as Flow) does. The community did not accept this solution. Unfortunately normal, unstructured talk pages do not allow for watching portions of pages, so I'm afraid there's not much we can do without reinventing a whole new system which is far too out of scope for us. The talk pages project indeed doesn't cover notifications at the moment, but it might in the future, so there is also concern with overlapping that project. I know volunteer Enterprisey is working on a solution for section watchlists (similar to what you're asking for), and that may work small-scale. Hopefully he'll prove us wrong that this is doable, but as it stands now the technology is not in place to support what you're asking for in a production environment. For this reason I will archive this proposal as out of scope. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 18:27, 17 November 2020 (UTC)