User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130401145406/@comment-188432-20130402195400
The fact that Wikia's webinar thing is not dismissing properly is for them to fix. That's not a local issue. For all I know they have a reason for it not to dismiss. It used to, so I can submit a bug report on that. But the fact that it's not working doesn't invalidate the intent of our local design.
Clicking on the "you have a hypercube" pop-up does dismiss it. Of course, if you have messages on more than one wiki, you have to go through every single wiki where you have messages. But once you make your final stop, it does go away. Also, the Game of Rassilon badge notification dismisses on the very next page load. It's only the webinar thing that doesn't, and I'll send Wikia email to try to resolve that. But the general rule is that if you click on the message notification, it takes you to read something and then goes away.
As for your other two paragraphs, if you're not an editor here, you wouldn't get any messages other than a message sent by Wikia themselves, like the webinar stuff. Again, that is their deal. It is a Terms of Use violation for me to turn it off, though God knows I wish I could.
But if you don't make an edit here, you will never get any kind of pop-up, except that you might get mail on another wiki. If so, just click the link in front of you and go to the other wiki.
I think you're massively exaggerating the extent to which the feature will annoy people to the point that they won't come back. And you're probably not familiar with problems we have locally with people saying they never saw the message alert pop up.
No one can now reasonably say that they didn't see that they got mail — and that's a good thing.
Can it use a few tweaks? Yes—there is still some residual fallout from the fact that we unusually have two skins here. The Xs should all be invisible on both skins, and they're currently only invisible on one. So that makes it look like there's a problem of consistency.