The number of users complaining about too many CentralNotice banners is increasing. The fact that some banners cannot be disabled at all, combined with localstorage being per-project and not global (T331671#8699099) doesn't help either, with several users reporting that they feel followed by the banners.
While we may wish to re-evaluate the CentralNotice usage guidelines, there's a technical angle here that is worth exploring and fixing.
I see on the CentralNotice interface that:
- No type campaigns are always shown, and
- Users cannot deactivate banners catalogued as Special or Maintenance via Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-centralnotice-banners or global preferences.
I propose the following:
- No type campaigns should have their own checkbox in Special:Preferences to allow users to deactivate them too. There's no reason at all to force this type of banners on every registered user just because the scope of the banner doesn't fall in any of the existing ones (or a CN Admin) forgot to clasify a given campaign.
- Please consider to allow users to deactivate Maintenance and/or Special banners via Local/Global preferences too, or at least one of them. I can see there may be cases in which we'd like to force banner display, so perhaps Special could be used for that. However it should documented clearly when and how the Special type should be used to avoid unnecesary circunvention of user's preferences.
Thank you.