Change 812890 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; author: Esanders):

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] Restore z-index of mw-notification-area

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/812890

How can we replicate this? Could you provide a screenshot?
I tried your steps but the notification doesn't overlap with the help dialog for me:
{F35317127}

@alexhollender_WMF @Jdrewniak the current patch suggested by Ed would make the notifications appear above the user menu. Looking back at T260338#7554263 it seems we never talked about the correct behaviour when user menu and notifications are present. Perhaps we should close the user menu when that happens to avoid that scenario ever occurring?

Currently:

@Jdlrobson it seems like enough of an edge case that we might not need to bother with extra code to make the user menu close, unless we think it will be common for the user menu to be open while a notification popup appears?

I agree with @alexhollender_WMF, notifications are ephemeral and dismissable. There's all sorts of UI or content they could conflict with (especially as you can have multiple notifications which stack), so I don't think we should do anything to de-conflict them beyond giving them a sensible starting position (which we already do).

I tried your steps but the notification doesn't overlap with the help dialog for me:
F35317127

Screenshot not attached.

You may need to make the window narrower to get the notification to actually overlap, but at any width the notification will appears under the white translucent modal mask:

In T312783#8078241, @Jdlrobson wrote:

Looking back at T260338#7554263 it seems we never talked about the correct behaviour when user menu and notifications are present.

This conversation was more than a month ago so naturally I have no recollection of it! I think the quote in T260338#7504148 was misattributed to me, and was actually by the author of T290270.

Either way I think we weren't considering the other z-index issues with notifications during that discussion, and on reflection I think having notifications be consistently on the top layer is more important, as they can be fired at any time by any piece of code.

If there was a common use case where the two menus conflicted (e.g. clicking something in the menu triggered a notification, or click something in a notification triggered a menu) then we could considered how to have one close the other, but I think this is just an uncommon edge case and not a problem.

@ovasileva not sure why this ended up in tech backlog. Seems very much a product/design request. The patch looks good to me, so it's just a case of organizing code review.

Hey @Esanders circling back to this now and have merged the patch.

I can't seem to replicate the QA steps for this ticket (as sticky header is disabled in edit mode)

There does seem some value in making this change to show notifications when the user menu is open (and even though this is an edge case less code seems better):

I'd like to add some QA steps, but want to check if the description is still relevant or if I should amend to show the user menu case?

Change 812890 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/skins/Vector@master] Restore z-index of mw-notification-area

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/812890

Test Result - Beta

Status: ✅ PASS
Environment: beta
OS: macOS Ventura
Browser: Chrome
Device: MBP
Emulated Device:NA

Test Artifact(s):

QA Steps

log in
Scroll down the page so sticky header shows
Open the user menu
Click the watchstar
Expected: notification appears ABOVE user menu