This is exactly what notifications does now?

Please check out our guide on filing feature requests here: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/feature_requests/

Specifically this statement could use clarification:

The activity feed and email/notifications help, but there's often too much noise.

The main concern with the proposed suggestion is it's a worse user experience to getting to "inbox zero". That is, in order to have gotten caught up on everything, you have to manually scan every task, every time. That's fairly inefficient, which is why notifications are kept in a separate list in a count. The entire reason we have notifications is to be the subset of all things you care about happening on Phabricator. If it's too noisy, I'd recommend spending some time in Settings to get it where you want it. (By default we notify you of everything so it does take some minor fine tuning).

Thanks for getting back to me Chad; I can also understand the reverse point you bring up, that such a feature could frustrate some users.

Clairifcation

Re: The activity feed and email/notifications help, but there's often too much noise.

Imagine my notifications drop-down looks like so:

Dave added a comment to T1
Dave closed T1
Joe added a comment to T1
Joe changed associated projects for T1
Joe opened T2
Joe add a comment on T1
Dave opened T1

Since 6/7 items in this list were about T1, its easy to accidentally miss the notification in the middle that T2 was created.

For me, there are really only two things I want to know if I'm sitting down in the morning:

1. T1 has been updated since I last opened it
2. T2 has been updated since I last opened it

So, framed in the context of the Contribution Guidelines document, I suppose that's the core 'problem.'

For completeness, though, I'll just fill in the details of the use case that prompted me to open this task with a specific solution in mind:

Earlier today I went to the workboard for our my team's roadmap project. I was curious to see if any new discussion had occurred in any of its tasks while I wasn't paying attention. ... and then ... lightbulb ... I thought, it would be cool to know, at a glance, exactly which items I wasn't caught up on. Instead, I Cmd+Click'd to open each task to find out if I had missed anything (I hadn't).

Thanks for your time and the discussion. Phabricator is a complete joy to use every day! Thanks for all your efforts.

Matt

I'm going to merge this into T5891 which covers a similar, but more extreme example with "I went away for two weeks and OMG so many notifications".

Sounds great. I like that task's title better anyways :)