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Create a Timer based reminder for workflows
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

As a user, I'd like to be able to remind myself of a task, after a configurable period of time.

E.g. Is it possible to create timed notification? I.e. if somebody reviews GA nomination and puts article on holds for 7 days. It would be useful to have timed notification as some kind of reminder for both nominator and reviewer. --Antidiskriminator (talk) 11:35, 8 January 2015 (UTC) (via)

E.g.2. [...] With WP:Flow, it might even be possible to get automatic follow-up reminders to reduce hassle for the admins. The main complaint in the past is that admins can't track these warned accounts efficiently, so "one week's fair warning, during which you need to get your name changed" turns into "indefinite freedom, because I can't remember who I warned". But if a Flow process automagically told you when the time was up, then you wouldn't have to remember anything.[...] WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:27, 6 January 2014 (UTC) (via)

E.g.3. [...]can we get some kind of remind-me-in-a-week feature [...] for all those times that we tell someone that we'll check back? [...] via

E.g.4. w:en:Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/RemindMeBot, and further discussion here. (request expired)

This reminder could be sent via an Echo notification.

Unanswered questions:

  • This needs some design assistance - how do editors setup a new reminder? What do they click, and what does it trigger?
  • Where would we store the data in the individually written reminder messages? (if server-side, please ping the Legal team once a development implementation has been planned, to get their review and ok)

This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey
This proposal received 30 support votes, and was ranked #32 out of 107 proposals. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Notifications#Reminders_in_notifications


See also

Event Timeline

There are a very large number of changes, so older changes are hidden. Show Older Changes

This is low for now, but when we get to the workflow part of Flow, this is something we'll definitely consider including.

I am thinking that in some cases, I would want to define a workflow based on the date or the day of the week, rather than an elapsed time. For example, I might want something to not happen on a weekend, or to always happen on a Monday.

Perhaps it could use business days to avoid things happening on the weekend (though different cultures have different work days during the week).

Is there an example of a workflow that always concludes on the same week day (e.g. Monday)?

Is there an example of a workflow that always concludes on the same week day (e.g. Monday)?

Tech/News starts translation on every Friday and is sent every Monday. (And there's lots of fiddly script stuff in between which Flow should someday fix, too.)

MediaWiki deployments happen weekly (and this often require tech users to check for breaking changes which might affect their scripts/gadgets):
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments/One_week

IMPORTANT: If you are a community developer interested in working on this task: The Wikimedia Hackathon 2016 (Jerusalem, March 31 - April 3) focuses on #Community-Wishlist-Survey projects. There is some budget for sponsoring volunteer developers. THE DEADLINE TO REQUEST TRAVEL SPONSORSHIP IS TODAY, JANUARY 21. Exceptions can be made for developers focusing on Community Wishlist projects until the end of Sunday 24, but not beyond. If you or someone you know is interested, please REGISTER NOW.

I have a couple of questions for those interested in this feature:

  • I want to be sure I understand the use case, which seems to be as follows: I've seen a notification. I have no time to address the issue (respond to the mention, etc.) right now. But because the notification has been marked as "read," I'm worried I won't remember to come back to it later. I'd like to have a way to remind myself that I need to do something about this notification. Is that about right?
  • Second question: is a reminder the only or best way to do this? Other familiar solutions from email programs include pinning, setting flags, sorting into folders... Would any of those be as good or better? Why?

The use cases are more like this:

  • Voting will start three days from now, and be open for seven days. It is important that I come back at the right time. If I come back either too early or too late, then I can't vote.
  • I have just warned a bunch of users that they need to change their usernames. I have told them that they have one week to do this, or else I'll block them. I must come back to each of their user pages after one week to see whether the account is both un-re-named and still active.

Pinning works if you don't care when you come back. I actually want to come back on a specific day. If I only pinned a few things, I could probably remember that this one was a page to check next week, but I (realistically) expect to have dozens or hundreds of things in my lists.

Also, the ability to add a note to the 'timer' would be handy. "Check this article on Tuesday to see whether the spam has reappeared" is more useful than "It's Tuesday! Look at this article and try to remember why you cared!"

@jmatazzoni This is partly/fully (the description suggests TBD) in regards to the workflows product/sub-product that was at one point planned for Flow. Echo could be used as a way to deliver notifications at relevant times in the workflow:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Collaboration/Workflows

Quiddity added subscribers: bzimport, Nemo_bis, Qgil and 2 others.

(Apologies for merging older-into-newer. There are many more comments in this task, hence I went the non-standard route, but I explained & copied the earlier task into the updated description)

This report seems much wider (concerning any sort of event or thing on the wiki rather than a specific page) and at the same time potentially unable to solve the earlier feature request (which is about a mere page title, or a wikitext page). I'm not sure it's a good idea to merge, especially since T883 will make it impossible to remember to reopen the other task if this goes another way.

@Nemo_bis I suspect you are correct. Will revert self. Sorry for the noise.

I think T2582: Remind me of this article in X days (possibly with the article name optional, but including free text) is closer to the scope of an Outreachy/GSOC than this task (T88781: Create a Timer based reminder for workflows )

This one is more ambiguous, but "if somebody reviews GA nomination and puts article on holds for 7 days. It would be useful to have timed notification as some kind of reminder for both nominator and reviewer" hints at a scope (understanding at least the concept that a particular workflow has two involved parties, reminding other people) that is larger and perhaps too much for Outreachy/GSOC.

Looks like an interesting feature. Can we have this or a part of this as an Outreachy-13 internship project?

Per Matt's advice, I've added the other slightly simpler task to Outreachy-13.

I am interested in this project....How can i start??

@Raspberrypy please see T2582 which is a simpler version of this task and open for Outreachy internship. Try to understand the task and see comments.

Also Please see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Life_of_a_successful_project for details on going on about with a project.
For any other queries just ask :)

srishakatux subscribed.

Removing the Possible-Tech-Projects tag as we are planning to kill it soon! This project does not seem to fit in the Outreach-Programs-Projects category in its current state, so I am not adding that tag right now!

For enwiki, I have a bot to allow users to schedule reminders for themselves that will be posted to their user talk page on the scheduled date

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Apr 24 2023, 2:53 PM