Hello @tkrieck , welcome to the dream forum!
Indeed. We proposed a dialog for having the most possible room available, as the options would require many explanations and be complex to explain. If a complex dropdown allows us to have all this while not blocking the flow of the user, fine with me.
Also, a modal would easily allow to move the bell button in another menu (e.g. under the More actions menu, as @vmassol suggest below) with no change in the code / UI whatsoever. A dropdown will need to be updated if the menu notification option is itself in a dropdown.
I didn’t read in detail all the UIs proposed for all cases.
For the icon, note that we’d need a 4 states icon (I can only see 2 in your examples above, we need the other 2).
While it’s looking good, I would say it takes too much room on the page itself (it would be a dedicated row only for this feature). Since this feature is only a setting (it does not provide any content information about the page but only shows the state of a setting), I wouldn’t give it that much room on the screen.
This forum is a conversational tool, to me, which makes notifications rather important. The wiki is a knowledge share tool (which sometime may need conversational features but not always).
This choice was on purpose, in order to make it obvious for the user that the 2 things presented on the UI are about the same thing.
I must admit that it’s not clear to me, from these other tools that use different icons, whether the 2 actions do the same thing - whether “watching” a page will only handle the notifications about that page or concerns something more than notifications.
In any case, if we need to change one of them, I may want to change the bell icon from the navbar :D. The bell icon in the navbar was initially just setting the watch state of a page in XWiki, and only when we added instantaneous notifications we decided to also put the list of notifications in it, so its initial purpose was config.
Now, to answer @vmassol’s feedback about the initial proposal:
There is, indeed. The objective was to not take too much space with it. Also note that the icon is not decorative here, it should change when the state of the watch of the page changes. So it’s as if it was “text” (meaning that it holds information), but it’s very compact.
Initially we wanted to remove it from the notification menu (the current bell) because that bell is already incredibly crowded and the current watch state of the current page was becoming more complex. Now, since we thought of a compact way of displaying the current state with actions available on click, we could move it back to the top menu but it’s still too crowded up there. Now, But as you said, it’s better placed in the page menu.
As I said above, I’m not 100% sure we do. The icon is holding information, it’s not just an icon, so it’s as if it would be just text without an icon 
. It is a menu that is different from the other menus up there, the question is whether we accept that or not. I don’t have a problem with a different menu being placed along the other menus on the page content menubar.
It’s perfectly possible to move it under …, as I said above, but then we can’t have a dropdown anymore for setting the settings. If we do so, we also need to decide whether we want the same principle (of displaying the state in the icon + label of the button) or just have an accessor button and have the state displayed in the modal.
Actually, if I’m not wrong, this is one of the first cases when we have such a menu for a page in XWiki: a menu that gives access to changing a setting of a page. Regardless of where we put this menu, the question I would ask here before anything is whether we agree that we want a button that shows the state of the current setting while giving access to changing it on click or we want to stick to our current types of menus that give access to the information & setting.
I’m very much for having a state-displaying button for handling watched pages, regardless of where we put it. To me, this kind of button may or may not have a text.
I hope this answers the questions,
Anca