Best practices for "Alerts" and "Notices"

[lwaldron]

I'm not clear what the difference is between the "Alerts" and "Notices" icon is. Both are empty for me, and I'd like to start using these to more seamlessly communicate among wiki users. I think that currently no one is yet using these. Can you advise us on best practices to e.g. (and feel free to point us to appropriate documentation):

1. ask a user a question about something they put on a page
2. be notified when something occurs on my Watchlist (can these be added to my Notifications, rather than only to my Watchlist page?)
3. inform a user that a page they created has been edited
4. be informed of all activity by a user that I want to follow

[tosfos]

I'm not clear what the difference is between the "Alerts" and "Notices" icon is.

From the docs:

The first badge (red, "alerts") contains most important notification types: new messages on your talk page, mentions, etc. The second badge (blue, "notices") contains less important notifications: pages links, message on other talk pages, etc.

ask a user a question about something they put on a page

The best place for this is probably that user's talk page. There are tools we can install to improve on the default talk pages. Either way, once you post something on their page, they should get an email notifying them, as well as a web message when they log in.

be notified when something occurs on my Watchlist (can these be added to my Notifications, rather than only to my Watchlist page?)

Will do. How should we set the below setting? By default it is true:

"Whether to send email notifications each time a watched page is edited (if false) or only the first time the page is changed before being visited again by the user (if true)"

inform a user that a page they created has been edited

I think the best way to do this is to add the page to their watchlist when they create the page. We can add a checkbox for this (to the forms) that defaults to "checked". Please let me know if that is sufficient.

be informed of all activity by a user that I want to follow

Interesting. I don't think this feature exists as a notification, though you can look at their User Contributions by going to a page like this . Should we research creating this feature?

[tosfos]

We enabled watchlist notifications. You've probably seen them already.

[tosfos]

How should we proceed here?

[lgeistlinger]

@lwaldron

[lwaldron]

I think things are OK as-is. The alerts and notices work well. A sweet future wishlist feature would be the ability to ping users with "@username" from the Talk page of any page in the wiki like we get accustomed to doing on Slack etc, but it's probably just a matter of getting used to the system. If Wikipedia manages without that then I think we can too ;)

[tosfos]

Noting regarding the wishlist that it looks like the new DiscussionTools will allow this. We should install it together with the pending 1.39 upgrade.

[lwaldron]

Nice!

[tosfos]

Re-opening now that we're on 1.39.