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Remove watchstar from Minerva mobile anonymous experience
Open, Stalled, LowPublic

Description

Background

Talking to @HFan-WMF we were discussing the user flow for anonymous users getting reading list. Currently we show watchstar to anonymous users to encourage them to sign up. In future we'd like to replace this with a more reader aligned feature - the reading list.

When we introduce this it would be preferable for it add an additional page action to the menu rather than replace an existing action (as presumably a new icon is more noticeable than replacing an existing icon).

This will also allow us to iterate consistently on desktop and mobile experiences.

Note: currently watchstar drives 3% of account creations on mobile.

User story

...

Requirements

  • The watchstar does not show to anonymous users on Minerva on mobile
  • The function initWatchstarCta is removed from resources/skins.minerva.scripts/ctaDrawers.js

BDD

  • For QA engineer to fill out

Test Steps

  • For QA engineer to fill out

Design

  • Add mockups and design requirements

Acceptance criteria

  • Add acceptance criteria

Communication criteria - does this need an announcement or discussion?

  • Add communication criteria

Rollback plan

  • What is the rollback plan in production for this task if something goes wrong?

This task was created by Version 1.2.0 of the Web team task template using phabulous

Details

Related Objects

StatusSubtypeAssignedTask
StalledNone
OpenNone
Resolvedjwang
ResolvedHFan-WMF
ResolvedHFan-WMF
ResolvedHFan-WMF
ResolvedBUG REPORTAnneT
ResolvedHFan-WMF
ResolvedEtonkovidova
DeclinedNone
Resolvedaude
ResolvedHFan-WMF
ResolvedEtonkovidova
ResolvedEtonkovidova
ResolvedEtonkovidova
ResolvedEtonkovidova
ResolvedEtonkovidova
ResolvedHFan-WMF
DeclinedNone
Openjwang

Event Timeline

HFan-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.Oct 29 2025, 7:42 PM
HFan-WMF moved this task from Incoming to Backlog on the Reader Experience Team board.
HFan-WMF lowered the priority of this task from Medium to Low.Dec 1 2025, 10:58 PM
HFan-WMF changed the task status from Open to Stalled.Mar 27 2026, 4:27 PM

Stalling for now, as this work will depend on the results of the Account Creation CTA experiment https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T420238

Change #1272826 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdlrobson; author: Jdlrobson):

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] Drop watchstar for anonymous users

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1272826

Change #1272826 abandoned by Jdlrobson:

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] Drop watchstar for anonymous users

Reason:

To be done at later date post-experiment.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1272826