We classified this for Q4 consideration but not necessarily action. The issue still needs to be thought through. While it sounds like there is support for the goal of distinguishing x-wiki notifications, we need to determine whether there is a solution that will clarify the situation.

In T130363#2158018, @jmatazzoni wrote:

While it sounds like there is support for the goal of distinguishing x-wiki notifications, we need to determine whether there is a solution that will clarify the situation.

Just to clarify, what was proposed in the ticket was to skip the highlighting of the badge in some of the cases when new cross-wiki notifications arrive, to avoid distractions from the work on the current wiki. For example making the badge turn blue for the first cross-wiki notification you get but not for the upcoming ones. There are details to figure out but the intent is not to highlight cross-wiki notifications more prominently (which I'm not sure is what you refer with "distinguishing x-wiki notifications").

Thanks Pau for clarifying the proposal. And yes, that's what I meant. The idea you describe has pros and cons, I think. It achieves the goal you're pursuing with minimal changes to our system, which is good. But my fear is that it would also create a perception of inconsistency ("I have new notifications; why didn't the badge highlight?"). Short of making a separate indicator or badge for x-wiki, which may be overkill for this problem, I don't know how to solve that....

In T130363#2159074, @jmatazzoni wrote:

Thanks Pau for clarifying the proposal. And yes, that's what I meant. The idea you describe has pros and cons, I think. It achieves the goal you're pursuing with minimal changes to our system, which is good. But my fear is that it would also create a perception of inconsistency ("I have new notifications; why didn't the badge highlight?"). Short of making a separate indicator or badge for x-wiki, which may be overkill for this problem, I don't know how to solve that....

To keep the ticket more clear, I moved the exploration of solutions to a closed sub-tiket, and tried to illustrate the intended change in the mental model:

In this way, the badge will react to the notification bundle as if it was a single notification (while still providing the global count of notifications).

The intent is that the whole cross-wiki bundle is what is perceived as being highlighted not when it grows internally. I think this can be perceived as consistent-enough. But I agree we need to both (a) give time to understand the impact of the current issue and (b) check that the proposed solution works as intended.

In reading this over, I think this is something we can save for next quarter. It's possible, for example, that the re-sorting of the panels will reduce users' sense of being distracted for no good reason. Let's consider this again after we've had a chance to get a sense of user response.

In T130363#2290808, @jmatazzoni wrote:

In reading this over, I think this is something we can save for next quarter. It's possible, for example, that the re-sorting of the panels will reduce users' sense of being distracted for no good reason. Let's consider this again after we've had a chance to get a sense of user response.

Makes total sense.

Now that cross-wiki notifications have been deployed, we want to give some time and collect feedback on stable use (i.e., after people get those very old notifications that got forgotten in time).

Also, bugs like T134854 (in the process of fixing) were contributting to draw unnecessarily extra attention to external notifications.