At the moment we don't display the topmost message on a user's Talk page, which is often a "welcome" message from a bot. This is because this type of message isn't part of a "section" in the talk page, and therefore doesn't correspond to a "topic" of conversation. It is also much more likely to contain complex HTML like tables, which might not render well in our interface.
The problem is that the user will receive a notification if a bot leaves a "welcome" template on the user's Talk page, and the user's understandable expectation is that tapping the notification will lead them to the message that was received. If the user taps the notification, but doesn't see any message, it would lead to confusion. Showing an imperfectly rendered message might outweigh showing nothing at all in this case.
We should therefore attempt to display these types of messages, with the following conditions:
- This type of message cannot be replied to.
- Since all messages require a "subject" in our UI, we will need to hard-code a subject to show for these messages. We could start by saying literally "[No subject]", and proceed from there.
