Moving this to the Freezer for now. If/when more people express a need for finer control over the talk page notifications they receive, we will revisit the priority of this task.

We should distinguish between subscribing to all current topics on a page, which the user script does, and subscribing to all **current and future* topics, but would require additional backend work.

I think the latter would be more useful in the case where you so interested in a subject you wanted to subscribe to all topics, for example I would want to subscribe to all current and future topics on our mediawiki.org project pages.

When subscribed to a page, a new topic should trigger a different type of notification (New topic created on X), probably with a secondary option to unsubscribe.

An alternative approach would be to only notify users when a new topic is created. The secondary action would then be to subscribe to new comments in the thread. This would allow users to find out about new topics (which is currently not possible), and then to easily decide on a per-topic basis if they want more subscriptions.

In T284795#8566654, @Esanders wrote:

An alternative approach would be to only notify users when a new topic is created. The secondary action would then be to subscribe to new comments in the thread. This would allow users to find out about new topics (which is currently not possible), and then to easily decide on a per-topic basis if they want more subscriptions.

You’re basically reinventing how Flow works. :) I don’t like it in Flow, as this way, I have to manually push the watch button for each and every topic on talk pages I’m generally interested in; but it may make sense for DiscussionTools, as if one wants to see all comments on a talk page, they can just use the watchlist instead of topic subscriptions.

Or, we should offer both types of functionality for the user to then choose which they like:

• Notifications when a new topic is posted
• Notifications for all page actions

Community wishlist 2023 proposal: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2023/Notifications,_Watchlists_and_Talk_Pages/On-wiki_notifications_for_the_Watchlist_or_subscriptions_per_page

In a perfect world we could create every variant of this feature to please every user. In practice we will only get around to deploying something like this if we can keep the initial version as simple as possible, both on the backend and frontend.

To that end I would suggest that a single button that subscribed you to notifications about new threads would be a great improvement and be the best balance for all users, and if we can re-use most of the infrastructure we set up for per-topic subscriptions there's a small chance someone might have time to do it.

(Also, someone could probably write a gadget to auto-subscribe you to a topic whenever you click on one of these "new topic notifications")

New topic notifications is T263821, so I've moved this comment to T263821#8570791

This appears to have been effectively resolved through T263821. If someone really wants both current and future topics, they can just subscribe to future ones and then manually subscribe to all the current ones. I think we can close this as declined/fulfilled elsewhere.