Dear designers and other stakeholders,

Your input on the following please. If at all possible, please use the bug -- https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/43960 -- for feedback.

MediaWiki has a feature that allows JavaScript to set arbitrary user preferences starting with "userjs-". They are currently in no way exposed in the user interface. The bug requests "Arbitrary userjs- preferences should be shown in the GUI, with the possibility of clearing them one-by-one".

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/48576/ contains a patch set by Tyler that "adds two new buttons to the reset form of Special:Preferences that allow users to reset only registered site settings or only userjs- custom settings. The main reset button still resets all settings as it has always done."

We know that our preferences can be very confusing. Adding two more buttons to "do stuff to it" could potentially increase user confusion. I have added Brandon, Munaf and Pau to this patch set as reviewers and I added them as a CC to the bug.

Before we are going in a direction with our Special:Preferences that may be contrary to where (a) Wikimedia's designers want to go, or (b) could increase user confusion, I think it is wise to gather some opinions on this issue, and possibly the wider issue of preferences, that James Forrester[1] at one point indicated he would be taking up as a project, but seems be have stalled since then.

Thanks for your input!

[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/27258/ (bottom comment states "[..] we're waiting on availability of someone in Product (possibly me) to work out a socialisation plan for informing the community of our intent to significantly simplify preferences."