Help talk:Notifications

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Mute button for notifications[edit]

I have a suggestion: add a MUTE button for notifications in Wikipedia. I think it would solve a lot of problems and make Wikipedia a healthier, more productive place.

If a user gets a notification in the notification menu saying "User X pinged you" or "User X left a message on your talk page" or "User X mentioned you" or any such message, you should be able to press a MUTE button for User X. You could do it right there in the first annoying notification you receive. That way if User X is really annoying you, you can simply mute them and they can't annoy you any more. If User X is muted, you won't see any notifications from User X at all. Problem solved!

Another idea would be to mute pings from all users instead of just muting the annoying ones. That way, if you're being harassed by many users (or you're simply popular!), and you're super busy or doing something super important and you just need to concentrate, and you're worried you will find it hard to ignore all the pinging, you can just mute everyone, finish your work, and UNMUTE everyone again later. I think we all know how hard it is to ignore notifications in a notification bar when there is a notification or alert that you haven't responded to. An example of this phenomenon can be found at the home page for the movie The Social Dilemma. The movie is about how people today have gotten stuck on responding to notifications and spend their life responding to alerts and notifications that really don't mean anything, or aren't important, and yet we just can't stop responding to them. If you want to experience this yourself, go to the home page for the movie and see if you can keep yourself from clicking that annoying alert at the top of the page. It's near impossible! We've all become so addicted to responding to annoying alerts, we just can't help ourselves. It's very sad, really.

There is, however, a drawback to muting specific annoying individuals. User X might not simply be messaging you directly, rather, he might be mentioning you by linking to your talk page. In such cases, User X might be talking behind your back, making personal attacks or otherwise just saying things about you that you don't like, and you might actually want to know about the ping so you can eventually deal with the problem. I don't think this is a material drawback for the mute button, though. In most cases, if User X were truly malicious and wanted to malign you, he could simply mention you in the text without actually linking to your talk page, and you wouldn't get pinged at all, so being able to actively monitor these maligners wouldn't really be possible anyway. Then again, if User X is maligning you and at the same time unwittingly pinging you by linking to your user page, for example if he were both malicious and ignorant of Wikipedia's intricate notification protocols, then maybe you might still want to know about it.

Fortunately, there is a rather straightforward workaround for this little drawback. Muted pings could be recoverable later with a SHOW MUTED notifications option. With this option, you could unhide the muted pings and deal with them appropriately when you have time. So, if you're worried User X might be making personal attacks or just talking behind your back, but you have too many important things to be doing at the moment and don't want to be annoyed by User X's pinging while you're trying to concentrate, and yet you're worried you might miss out on the fact that User X was talking behind your back, you can just mute User X, finish the important things you are doing, and then at your leisure you can select the SHOW MUTED notifications option, view all the previously hidden notifications, check whether you were indeed being maligned by User X or any other muted users, and if you were, then you can take appropriate action.

Of course, it would probably be a lot easier to mute User X once and for all and not worry about whether he might possibly be maligning you behind your back, and simply allow other community members to defend you. But most people have a hard time doing that.


Coastside (talk) 09:57, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

@Coastside: Some of this is already available. If you visit, say, User:John of Reading, and look at the tools menu on the left hand side, you'll see "Mute this user", which leads to some options that would stop me interacting with you. And in the "Notifications" tab of your preferences, at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo, there are lots of options to limit the kinds of notifications you receive. I don't know if muted notifications are queued anywhere, though, so your "show muted notifications" idea might need extra development work. -- John of Reading (talk) 10:32, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
@John of Reading: This is really great to know. I didn't realize there already was a mute button. I think pages about "Wikiquette", behavioral issues, Dispute resolution, and so forth should all include a prominent link to a page that clearly says something like, "Remember, you can always hit the mute button!". It would go a long way to eliminating unnecessary escalations. What's strange is that one sees a lot of "Now, stop pinging me!" messages in various threads, yet no one mentions that you can simply mute someone. What's even stranger is that the people who suffer from and complain the most about being over-pinged by annoying users are likely those who have been on Wikipedia the longest or are the most active, and you'd think they would know about this feature. Weird.Coastside (talk) 14:25, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
It's a comparatively new feature; whilst user mention notifications went live in April 2013 (and we still get people who don't appreciate the first paragraph of WP:PINGFIX), the "Muted users" feature was added later, around July 2017. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:13, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

help finding a policy in the Manual of Style[edit]

Please consider giving the Help:Notifications page a disambiguation hatnote similar to one below.

or (talk) 05:22, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

{{on hold}} - More information required I'm not seeing a connection between the word "notifications" or "notification" and the concept of "disambiguation." Can you clarify why a hatnote like this would be helpful enough to warrant using?
Speaking of "notifications" if you were logged in, I could use the "notification" system to leave you an alert. But since I {{ping}}'ing an IP address doesn't give the notification, I didn't bother. I mean, the @-sign will show up if I do, but that's not all that useful without the "notification" aspect.
davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 15:58, 29 November 2020 (UTC) First paragraph struck, see below. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:10, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
@Davidwr: I think the IP editor is referring to the fact that the link WP:MENTION redirects here; which could be confused with WP:DABMENTION (or MOS:DABMENTION, which is the shortcut listed at the target section) and/or WP:Mention of wiki in articles - both of which also have the word "mention" in them. Seagull123 Φ 17:05, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The request is about clearing up possible confusion between WP:MENTION and WP:DABMENTION. I am not opposed to this hatnote, but are these really confusable? WP:MENTION has a total of 10 clicks per month. – Thjarkur (talk) 17:07, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
In light of the comments above, I'm ambivalent on this. I don't want to say "no" outright, but I don't want to say "of course, let me do that for you" without more discussion. While I recommend allowing at least a day for other comments, if another editor wants to make this change, I won't revert it. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:10, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
@davidwr, Seagull123 , and Thjarkur:
Sorry for the delayed response.
Even if i don't get my hatnote, thank you for acknowledging and considering my request, and being polite about it. i've seen requests and suggestions (my own and others') ignored, and i've seen them rejected in rather hurtful ways.
i was looking for WP:DABMENTION, but i thought the shortcut was WP:MENTION. That i found someplace i'd previously seen the link i wanted was more by luck than skill with a search box. The search box suggested wp:mention of wiki in articles, and i just figured, "why not?" (although i'm not sure if "wp:partial title matches" supports or opposes the idea).
i don't know what pinging looks like for logged in users, but i got a line of bold text highlighted in yellow at the top of Wikipedia telling me i had a new message and linking to my talk page. User:Seagull123 probably had to go out of the way to send me that notification, though, so thanks for that. (i don't think i've tried pinging more than once or twice before, and pretty sure i did it wrong, but i imagine you get used to it so it's easy to do... if you're pinging a registered user.) (talk) 06:51, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

It's been more than a week, so I'm going to make a judgment call and decline the request. People looking for the dab page will probably know to put "DAB" in their search. WP:Mention of wiki in articles basically never gets used.  Ganbaruby! (Say hi!) 16:24, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Alerts about failed attempts[edit]

Not sure if this is the right place, but yesterday and today, I have received over a hundred alerts about failed attempts to log in. At the beginning, when a dozen or so were showing, it concerned me, and I changed my password, but it seemed like this led to even more alerts. (Or maybe it didn't matter.) See screenshot here. Any idea what is going on, and what to do to address it? Erik (talk | contrib) (ping me) 15:24, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

I have also been receiving these "multiple failed attempts" notifications, both yesterday and today. See the related discussions here: Wikipedia:Bureaucrats' noticeboard#Advice? Someone's trying to brute-force my account and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Obvious attempts at bruteforcing my password not being prevented. Some1 (talk) 16:07, 9 January 2021 (UTC)

Ping from doppelganger account[edit]

A few times my username gets miscapitalised. Is it possible for me to create a doppelganger account for this and get any pings sent to it to come to my main account? AIRcorn (talk) 04:05, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

(i) yes; (ii) no. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:08, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
@Aircorn: The doppelganger could enable email for mentions at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:28, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
I think it's less an issue of miscapitalization but of copying the wrong capitalization from your signature? In that case the easier thing to do is to make the capitalization of your signature same as the actual username. As Redrose64 said, you cannot forward notification to another account, so the alt account would not really do what you want here. – Ammarpad (talk) 06:34, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
You could also use text-transform:uppercase in your signature: Aircorn (talk). It copy-pastes as Aircorn and says Aircon in the wikitext but doesn't help if users manually type AIRcorn. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:55, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
Even when there is no change of capitalisation between the true username and that displayed in the signature, some people will still get it wrong. I blame manual typing, rather than copy&paste: a number of times I've seen edits in my watchlist containing @RedRose64: which didn't notify me (of course) - I have never capitalised the second R; in fact I used two small R when I first registered, not realising that the first would be automatically capitalised. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:18, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks all. Since it is not possible I will just change my signature. Aircorn (talk) 22:26, 13 January 2021 (UTC)