Last modified: 2014-11-17 09:21:36 UTC
The red badge in Echo is great if there's an urgent matter requiring attention. But I recently got a bright red (1) to know that a link was added to a page (I'd opted in). I think Echo's badge color should vary a bit. Perhaps blue if there's only new info? Or purple if there are urgent matters and informational matters? ;-) Submitted for consideration.
While I'm all for reducing or removing the use of red for notification, I'm not sure a system of different colors is going to be clear to most users. What I'd like to see is separate access points with different notification, for example: Talk page notification, Watchlist notification, General Echo Notification, or some permutation or combination of those. While it is common for most sites to use red as a notification color,I agree with you that it may not be necessary. The current red notification color was arrived in agreement with community members who felt the other colors (yellow & orange?) were not visible enough. One issue with the use of different color for different notification types is what happens when you have different notification as the same time, certainly a solvable issue, but it calls into question if you started in the right place to begin with?
Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/flow/cards/300
2 current threads discussing the red badge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications#Colouring_the_notification_badge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications#Notification_badge_colour_selection and requesting something less "alarm"ing, or requesting different colors for different notification-types. The underlying problem (not knowing whether good news or bad news lies behind the red [1]... or the red [37]...) is also what bug 56476 seeks to solve. (Using split icons (instead of varying colors), all icons would trigger the single flyout, but giving forewarning as to what is inside)
