@Lea_WMDE @Jan_Dittrich

Here are the current drafts for the alert messages based on @Pginer-WMF design suggestions and what already exists when receiving multiple mentions for example as seen here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/M132. Please provide feedback.

Looks good to me.

Concerning the text: In many projects, the info texts in regards to errors/problems are a bit more "emotionally comforting" ("We are Sorry! Firefox crashed…), but I don't know about the policy here, also because I could not find any error messages as example. Possibly an interesting question to @Pginer-WMF.

In the context of notifications, we try to optimise for scannability, trying to make the messages as succinct as possible, since they will be processed in a list along other messages.

In that regard, from the examples in F4171034#321 we could try making the 3 lines long message a bit more compact. One way to achieve that is to rely on the secondary actions to provide context:

53 mentions you made were not delivered because the limit of 50 was exceeded.
[Douglas Adams] [View mention]

It's not a final document, but some of the guidelines for notification design were captured here. Some examples of the copy used in other notifications were compiled in this spreadsheet.

@Pginer-WMF is this what you were thinking?
I didn't add the [view mention] part since the other notification examples didn't include one either when a page was mentioned in such a way like here https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Notification-guide-bundled-items.png

Great progress!
Just to have all info together, I'll add all the different options that we currently handle in T136326:

Texts for only one mention failing

• Your mention for "UserX" was not sent because the user was not found.
• XX mentions you made were not sent because they exceeded the limit of 50.
• Your mention for 100.200.300 was not sent, because the user is anonymous.
• Your mention for "UserY" was not sent because you mentioned him/her on his/her own page.
• Your mention was not sent because it was addressed to yourself.

All of them would have a link to the mention and I like @Pginer-WMF's idea of adding a link to the page, too, so you have that info immediately.

If there were more than 1 mention failure,I suggest following @Charlie_WMDE's second approach:

• For the "main message": Two mentions you made on the Douglas Adams talk page were not sent. [Collapse][View mentions]
• For the collapsing part:
  • User not found: Userx
  • User was anonymous: 100.200.300
  • Mention on his/her own talk page: Usery
  • Mention to yourself

I didn't add the [view mention] part since the other notification examples didn't include one either when a page was mentioned in such a way like here

The secondary actions depend on which actions are relevant in the context. For this particular case, I assumed that accessing the message where you mentioned the people was important to help you recall which of the many messages you sent is the notification talking about. Maybe both page and mention actions can be a single one (using the page name for context and leading to that page with the relevant mention highlighted). I'm ok either way.

Texts for only one mention failing

Wording look good, but I have a couple of questions about the purpose of the later two:

Your mention for "UserY" was not sent because you mentioned him/her on his/her own page.

While the mention is not sent, users get notified about the activity in their user talk pages. In a conversation that many people participate, mentions can be used to clarify who are you addressing specifically, so getting an error when you are just doing that may result in unnecessary distraction.

Your mention was not sent because it was addressed to yourself.

If we plan to notify that we cannot mention yourself, maybe we should just let you mention yourself (which is what happen with this error message anyway) or do nothing instead.

While the mention is not sent, users get notified about the activity in their user talk pages.

That is a very good point. Taking the error message out

If we plan to notify that we cannot mention yourself, maybe we should just let you mention yourself (which is what happen with this error message anyway) or do nothing instead.

Very true, too. I'm opting for allowing people to notify themselves, since either they explicitely decided that they wanted a notification or it was a Freudian slip and that would be nice to realize, too.

Final texts (for the moment :) ):

Texts for only one mention failure on save:

• Your mention for "UserX" was not sent because the user was not found.
• XX mentions you made were not sent because they exceeded the limit of 50.
• Your mention for 100.200.300 was not sent, because the user is anonymous.

Texts for more than one mention failure reason

• For the "main message": Two mentions you made on the Douglas Adams talk page were not sent.
• For the collapsing part:
  • User not found: Userx
  • User was anonymous: 100.200.300

Hey everyone,

here is are the reworked mocks:

I added the opened 'more options' box on the right side with 2 options of text.

I added the opened 'more options' box on the right side with 2 options of text.

This looks good.

My only concern is about the "Learn more about mentions". Since I'm not sure notifications are the right place for generic help entry points. If there is important information about the specific notification, it maybe worth providing access to it, but other general information should be either accessible once the user clicks on the notification.

In the current example it is not very problematic, but I'd avoid starting the trend of having a help action for each notification.

Three things while doing the last bits of the patch:

• For now it is not possible to have a prioritized linked in a bundled message next to the Expand and Collapse link. See

(14:16:52) stephanebisson: CFisch_WMDE: You are not doing anything wrong ;)  For the first iterration, 
we decided to push everything else in the dotdotdot menu to emphasize the 'expand' option and work around layout issues.

• Learn more about mentions is too long for the secondary links. Something about 23 chars seems to be the maximum here. So I need a new text.

• Were should the Learn more link go exactly? Should it be translatable?

@Charlie_WMDE @Lea_WMDE

Also @matej_suchanek suggest using short variant Anonymous user: in the compact message

( see https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/295351/12/i18n/en.json )

We decided to use "About mentions" as link title instead, but to refrain from adding that link as long as it is not possible to open a new tab from a notification (see T139344)

I just realized that "53 mentions you made because the limit of 50 was exceeded" is something the user will never see, due to the fact, that we stop the parsing of the user links when we reach the limit. So we do not know how many users the author tried to mention it will always be 50.

Therefore the message should say something more general like Your mentions were not delivered because they exceeded the limit of 50.

@Jan_Dittrich @Lea_WMDE

sounds good to me! @Charlie_WMDE ?

I agree. Already changed that in the new mocks :)

T140224