Hi everybody,
in a discussion in the chat, I learned today that when you ignore notifications for a document or space, you’re not only ignoring the notifications you subscribed to in a parent space or wiki, but you’re also ignoring targeted events like mentions. I would like to propose to change this behavior and to let notification filters that don’t list the ignored events explicitly not block targeted events.
Optionally, we could also introduce another kind of “ignore” filter that explicitly ignores all events including targeted events. Even with this additional kind of filter, my proposal here would be to let all existing filters not ignore targeted events.
I would like to give you an example why I believe this behavior makes sense: I’ve recently enabled notifications for the “dev” wiki on xwiki.org, so I get notifications for changes in it. Then I noticed that there are many changes that concern release plans. I’m not interested in them, so I added an ignore filter for that space. What I didn’t intend to do, though, is to block mentions from that space - but that’s what happened.
What is more common in your experience when you want to ignore notifications: that you want to ignore mentions or that you still want to receive notifications for mentions?
Thank you very much for your answers!
PS: This proposal is to get an initial feedback, for actually changing the behavior of the existing filters we would need a vote.
2 Likes
+1
To give a bit of history, pre-filtering was initially completely ignoring all filters in case of targeted events. But it was changed as part of Loading... (because it made impossible for a user to disable this type of events AFAIK), so we need to be careful to not put back the same limitation.
I think that your use case says it all. In a situation where change notifications lose their worth because of the sheer volume of changes, mention notifications do not lose their worth simultaniously. The question in my opinion is: Do mention notifications ever lose their worth?
tl;dr +1 
It could happen if there’s a high volume of them, just like any notification 
However, reaching this high volume is not something I’d expect to happen often, since every notification is written by a human with an explicit purpose and target.
Here’s a couple examples:
- Bots spamming mentions - should not happen for too long if the moderation of the wiki is on point.
- Some individual with a lot of responsibilities in the wiki organisation getting mentionned on too many topics – cannot keep up with them.
For both of these examples, I doubt the mentions would be kept in a specific set of pages, so they seem to only lose value at a wiki level. These can be disabled with user preferences. Users in those situations will have disabled their mentions.
If the user preference still keeps them enabled, this’d mean we’re not in a case where the mentions lost value.
The change above only concerns the users with mentions enabled, so I agree that in any situation where this’d make a difference it would be an improvement. I could not find a use case where the user would expect mentions to be removed only for a set of pages.
Thanks for your proposal Michael!