"Archived" notifications should be referred to as "Read"

[gupta-anmol]

Summary:

"Read" notifications are referred to as "archived" notifications. However, this is inconsistent with how the website displays the notifications.

What did you expect the app to do, and what did you see instead?

When you open archived notifications, the option to go back says View unread which is again, inconsistent. We should either refer to notifications as archived and unarchived, or read and unread. In my opinion, we should follow the latter labelling.

Commons app version:

2.12.0-debug-master~d0d663578

Would you like to work on the issue?

Yes, if we can agree the issue is genuine then I'd like to work on this.

[sivaraam]

This looks like a good change to me 🙂

[madhurgupta10]

@sivaraam I agree. It makes more sense to change the name to read

[maskaravivek]

As far as I remember we used the word "Archived" as this is what the Wikipedia app uses. While building the notifications feature, we tried to follow the same user experience/behavior as the Wikipedia app.

Before making changes lets double-check the following:

• the terminology Wikipedia app is using
• the behavior in our Commons app ie. are all the notification in "Archived" actually marked as read or not.

[gupta-anmol]

• the terminology Wikipedia app is using

It indeed uses the word "Archived". I find it strange though, given that the website doesn't follow this terminology. Perhaps the website changed it.

• the behavior in our Commons app ie. are all the notification in "Archived" actually marked as read or not.

Yes, they are. I confirmed this by checking the unread and archived notifications in my account through the app and the website, and they match.

[maskaravivek]

Thanks for checking both these @6point022. Let us get some more opinions and if everyone agrees then I am okay with this change.

[sivaraam]

As far as I remember we used the word "Archived" as this is what the Wikipedia app uses. While building the notifications feature, we tried to follow the same user experience/behavior as the Wikipedia app.

That's an interesting point. I went searching for the rationale behind using "Archived" in phabricator. Here are some related tasks that I could find:

• ⚓ T201933 Add a Notifications UI to the Android app
• ⚓ T123155 [EPIC] Echo notifications on Wikipedia mobile apps (Android & iOS)

I don't speak for them but from what I understand from those tasks and from using the app, they've used "Archived" as they provide a flow in which you could treat the list of unread notifications as kind of a backlog of notifications that you would like to get back to. They also provide ways to move a notification "to" and "from" the archive. We could ask them about the rationale, if necessary.

That said, I don't think the commons app provides a way to move the notifications "from" the archive to the "unread" group. So, I don't think the commons app is providing the "same user experience/behavior as the Wikipedia app" yet. 😉

As we are show the "Unread" notifications and only provide a way to mark them as read without anyway to mark them as "Unread" like the Wikipedia app, I think it makes sense to do this change.

[gupta-anmol]

@misaochan @macgills I'd really appreciate your inputs to proceed with this issue.

[macgills]

I say do it

[misaochan]

I'm on board with it. :)