Hello,
upon request at Czech Wikipedia's helpdesk I created a tool that sends notifications about new weekly articles by e-mail together with its first paragraph and link to it. To accomplish such a thing I need user's email, so I firstly decided to store it in a database. To prevent this tool from spamming I of course require its confirmation by accessing an URL with a random string (MD5 hash of user's email
and random number from 1 to 100; I mean, those two things are in one hash). You can have a look at this tool at
tools.wmflabs.org/wiki2email/.
My question is: Is this okay? Should I add some kind of formal information to the tool? If so, is there some help page? Should I stop with collecting mails at all and use some WMF-maintained service for mass-emailing (mailman at
lists.wikimedia.org maybe?) and make the tool to just send an email to the list itself?
This question came to my mind before creating, so I do appologize for asking after programming.
Best regards,
Martin Urbanec