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Page-level "Subscribe" button is displayed on main page and all Project: pages, regardless of them being a discussion or not
Open, Needs TriagePublicBUG REPORT

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

What happens?:
There's a Subscribe action in the Tools menu.

What should have happened instead?:
The main page is definitely not a discussion page and the "Subscribe" button is useless there. It creates an impression that the extension is wrong at sensing what's the page content as well.

Software version (skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):
Currently, the "Subscribe" button for the whole page is shown if any of the following is met:

  • the namespace permits signatures (talk or in $wgExtraSignatureNamespaces) - introduced by T249036
  • there's __NEWSECTIONLINK__ present on a page

(as coded in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools/+/refs/heads/master/includes/Hooks/HookUtils.php#381)

I feel like it's a too broad assuption for page-level subscription as it includes pages that were never meant to contain discussion (since $wgExtraSignatureNamespaces means there are pages there that house discussions and not all pages there house discussions). I'd rather make the reasoning like show Subscribe if we are in talk namespace or there is new section link available, which is usually present on wiki discussion pages outside of talk NS.

Note: comment recognition conditions should probably stay unchaged from what's now, since it doesn't affect a page without comments.

Event Timeline

There are also pages in $wgExtraSignatureNamespaces namespaces that contain discussions but don’t have __NEWSECTIONLINK__, e.g. pl:Wikipedia:Propozycje do Artykułów na Medal, so excluding all pages without new section tabs isn’t good either.

Yeah, you're right. However, on that page every discussion is in h3-level section. H2-sections are to split the page into "fresh discussions", "prolonged" and so on. It's unlikely that a new h2 will be added in a foreseeable future.

I didn’t think about that. Yes, probably most pages using a such setup use <h3>-level sections, so this feature doesn’t provide any benefit; but a few do use <h2>-level sections, e.g. hu:Wikipédia:Bürokraták üzenőfala (here, the big categories are <h1>-level, and the individual requests are at the <h2> level).

There are pages that aren't in a talk namespace, and don't have __NEWSECTIONLINK__ because they use some custom workflow for posting, but which do contain discussions (for example XfD pages on en.wiki). These would be excluded if we restricted the logic in this way.

I'd rather make the reasoning like show Subscribe if we are in talk namespace or there is new section link available, which is usually present on wiki discussion pages outside of talk NS.

This sounds like a good idea to me. It would also match what we're currently planning for the changes to talk page appearance (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_project/Usability; per T325417 and T331635), so it wouldn't be too complex to make this change (both in terms of the code, and in terms of keeping all the configuration in our heads / documenting how it works).

[comment mid-air collision with Ed]

I suppose we could find out how many people have used page-level subscriptions on such pages, and how many notifications they got, and decide whether it would be acceptable to lose the feature there depending on that?

The Editing team recently added a way to disable this behavior for individual pages, using the __NOTALK__ magic word (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:DiscussionTools/Magic_words_and_markup). I added it to the Polish Wikipedia main page: https://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Strona_główna&diff=prev&oldid=71731927 and I suggest doing the same for the main pages of other projects.

The issue is still valid though, we shouldn't have to do that for every page.