(I'm assuming the line 'The "yellow bar" notifications about talk page edits' in the "Deleted Elements" section refers to the orange-ish "You have new messages bar".) If the notice for when one's talk page is edited is removed, there will need to be a suitable replacement for it, and I don't think a tiny number at the top of the screen is good enough. When my talk page is edited, I want to be aware of it right away. Lumping it together with things like "your watchlist on some other wiki shows that some category you created years ago had an interwiki added to it" would get rather annoying. A much more prominent, immediate notice is needed, in my opinion.
Topic on Talk:Notifications/Flow
I'm confused too, user talk message and equivalents should have a much higher prominence than everything else and because they currently don't I'm losing all real-time talk messages on this wiki. Typically, a talk messages has to be read immediately if you're active. If you ignore one and continue editing when maybe someone has asked you to stop on your talk, you can typically be blocked within five minutes; just to convey how immediate the notification is supposed to be by normal users. Filed as bugzilla:43440.
A kind IP reverted an edit of mine, so I can say that the notification about this doesn't seem less prominent at all than the one about usertalk messages. This seems very wrong.
Hi Yair Rand and Nemo, thanks for pointing out this issue. We're aware of the problem, and are considering our options for talkpage messages. One possible approach would be to give talk notifications their own flyout, separate from the general notifications. We'll discuss this with the development team in coming days and get back to you. Thanks again for bringing this up and stay tuned ...
Thank you, nice to hear! I'll definitely stay tuned.
You're welcome. If the current Echo beta version is causing issues for you, you can turn off these notifications in your user preferences: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo
Under 'Display options', check this box: 'Hide the link and badge for notifications in my toolbar', then click 'Save'. This should remove the notifications link and badge, as well as restore the yellow messages for now, if you prefer that old version.
We'll post an update here as soon as we have a resolution on this issue. Thanks again for your understanding.
I feel a bit ashamed of my aversion to changes in MediaWiki, but I admit I've immediately made use of this new option. I'm looking forward to testing more updates, though!
It is good to have testers who are somewhat averse to change, as well as newbies who don't know change when they see it - both make good critics for their demographic :)
I'd also like to see talk messages be one of a very few critical notifications, eventually including realtime pings while working on a page [a la fb chat popups].