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Change maximum unread notifications allowed in notification tray dropdown from 25 to 200
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Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):
Current behavior is you subscribe to a busy thread, it gets 100 new edits overnight, but the notification dropdown tray groups them into one group of 25 (25 is some kind of hard-coded maximum).

You then click on "All notifications" as a workaround, hoping to see the rest of the notifications grouped together, but this view loses the groupings completely.

The problem with a maximum of 25 is you'll often only end up seeing the most recent 25 revisions highlighted, which means that you're reading things out of order. That is, you're reading the most recent replies, without reading some in between replies.

My proposal is to lift the cap of 25. If there's 100 replies to the same thread overnight, I'd like it to group all 100 notifications together, and let me click on it as one item, and then go to the page and highlight those 100 paragraphs that changed.

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

I wonder if this is unintentional. I can't find anything that would limit the bundles (groups) to 25 items. However, the number of items shown in the dropdown is limited to 25 (which I found hardcoded in a few places), and perhaps this just interacts poorly with bundling.

Thanks for the quick response. I think you're right, I think it's a maximum of 25 for the whole dropdown tray. The below screenshot adds up to 25. I will update the ticket.

image.png (890×959 px, 74 KB)

Novem_Linguae renamed this task from Change maximum notifications grouped together from 25 to no limit to Change maximum unread notifications allowed in notification tray dropdown from 25 to no limit.Sep 8 2022, 10:02 PM
Novem_Linguae updated the task description. (Show Details)
kostajh added subscribers: Trizek-WMF, KStoller-WMF, kostajh.

Increasing the limit to something like 100 is probably easier than reworking to support "no limit" with a potentially very large number of items. Would that work for you?

I didn't find information about why the 25 limit was added, it looks like it was there from early on in rECHO9262614ded46: Initial version of Special:Notifications Javascript page and rECHOcf994794683a: Display a message if there are no notifications in Special:Notifications.

200 might be a better upper limit. But yes I'd be fine with any increase. Incremental improvement is good :)

200 might be a better upper limit. But yes I'd be fine with any increase. Incremental improvement is good :)

+1; @kostajh is this something the Growth Team can take on fixing?

200 might be a better upper limit. But yes I'd be fine with any increase. Incremental improvement is good :)

+1; @kostajh is this something the Growth Team can take on fixing?

@KStoller-WMF without having looked too closely, it seems like it would involve updating a number (25) used in a few places to a higher limit (200), plus QA time from @Etonkovidova. Should we try to fit this in sometime in the next weeks?

I'm in support of this change, but we already have way too much work pulled into our current sprint. So, in an attempt to help us focus and stick with how we attempt to prioritize passive maintenance work, I'm going to move to Triaged rather than Current Sprint.

Novem_Linguae renamed this task from Change maximum unread notifications allowed in notification tray dropdown from 25 to no limit to Change maximum unread notifications allowed in notification tray dropdown from 25 to 200.Sep 30 2022, 8:59 AM

On the API side, suggest updating includes/api/ApiEchoNotifications line 585 to

IntegerDef::PARAM_MAX => ApiBase::LIMIT_BIG1,
IntegerDef::PARAM_MAX2 => ApiBase::LIMIT_BIG2,

That should raise the notification API limit from 50/500 to 500/5000, allowing non-admins to fetch 200 notifications at a time.

Will try to finish the JavaScript side of this and write a patch, if I can get DiscussionTools working on my localhost wiki. Currently when I click subscribe nothing happens, so I must have broke something or missed a step when installing it. My goal is to get it installed so I can subscribe to a topic thread, add 26 responses, then the notification tray will group them into 25 notifications. Then I can test my JavaScript changes to make sure that it turns into a group of 26.

Also open to suggestions on other ways I can test this.