And if not, will a build up over time slow me down? Should there be a "list" where I can delete them? Doug Weller (talk) 07:41, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Flow
And a related question: what happens to a subscription when the pages gets archived? At that point I imagine it gets deleted to avoid old subs building up?
At the moment, there's a hard limit of 5,000 subscriptions per user per wiki, and after that point (which nobody's come close to), you can't add any more.
A long list shouldn't slow you down.
When a conversation gets copied to a different page (e.g., by an archiving bot), the subscription transfers to the new page. This means that if someone adds a new comment to an archived discussion, you will still get notifications. However, the name of the old/original page is still displayed and linked in Special:TopicSubscriptions.
So if I add 10 a day, in about a year and a half I'll have to stop. But I think I add more than 10 a day just by starting a new topic. What's the plan for that?
Editing's devs' plan is to remove the hard limit. Whether they'll get agreement (e.g., from Ops) might still be an open question, but I think we still have a few months before it will become a problem for anyone.
Looking at your contribs last month, you used the New Discussions tool to create 130 sections, and you used the Reply tool about 450 times. Originally, automatic subscriptions were only enabled for those two tools (e.g., not for Twinkle), and I believe that's still the current situation.
I'd really like to know how well it's working for you. Is it a good idea? Would you recommend it to others? What kind of editor will it work best for?
It's pretty good but I find it discourages me leaving edit summaries, which I predict it will do for others. When I do I feel the need to remove the word "reply" as it looks awkward. We need to do everything we can to encourage edit summaries. IMHO one reason to revert a dubious edit is lack of explanation for the edit. Agh, why wasn't I automatically logged in when replying? Refreshing logged me in.
I remember you mentioning this concern at enwiki last month. I don't think that people revert signed talk-page comments due to a lack of explanation. They're pretty self-explanatory.
Sorry, I wasn’t thinking, that’s articles of course.. So long as not encouraging people to leave edit summaries on talk pages doesn’t effect their leaving summaries on articles.
Damn, happened again.
I think the best way to make people’s article edit summary customs be independent from their talk page edit summary customs is actually what this project does: present a completely different UI that doesn’t even show the edit summary field by default—this reinforces that talk pages and articles are fundamentally different and should be used differently.
Terrible idea. Edit summaries can still be important on talk pages.
I agree that they can be important. In my experience, though, when you're posting a new comment (as opposed to, e.g., editing someone else's comment), they almost never are important.
For what it's worth, our intention around the 5,000 subscriptions limit is that it was added in case we were monumentally wrong about our estimate of how much data this feature would generate. E.g. If a lot of people had managed to hit the limit within a few weeks of usage, we'd have had to rethink our storage needs. But they haven't, and so I think our current plan is to remove the limit before anyone actually hits it. (Again, unless things change and make us reconsider that...)
Thanks.
@Whatamidoing (WMF) - did the 5000 limit ever get removed? If not is there a tracking task open to do so?
And is it technically possible to build in a “delete after one year” or something similar?
Yes, it has been removed in T294881.
It would be technically possible to make them expire and get deleted automatically, we have a task for it here: T278190. We also have one about making it easier to clear out your subscriptions manually: T292035. I don't know if we'll get around to working on these, though.