On 01/11/2013 07:18 AM, Oliver Keyes wrote:
I think one thing we may need to consider is what this binds us into. So, there's a very good reason as to why a /lot/ of the old guard have disabled email or not provided accounts - the emailing system built into MediaWiki sucks. It can be, will be and has been used for wide-scale abuse that it's pretty difficult to shut down.
We could require email, but just disable "Enable e-mail from other users" by default. This is a setting, but it's true by default now.
Also, I think a large part of the old guard know how to use email solely for password resets (there's only four checkboxes, and only two are checked by default, "Enable e-mail from other users, and "E-mail me when my user talk page is changed").
In my experience, EmailUser is used occasionally (e.g. for me, sometimes for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Resource_exchange and adoption/mentoring), but not all that often. If I had to guess, I'd say new users without mentors would use it less.
We could change the wording of MediaWiki:nowikiemailtext (which shows when you try to email someone that doesn't allow it) to say something along the lines of:
"Users choose whether they want to receive email, and it is disabled by default for new users. This user currently does not allow it.
Consider posting {{tl|please enable email}} on [[User:Joe|Joe]]'s talk page to request they enable it. They are not required to do so and can change their mind."
We could JavaScriptify that too if we wanted.
Matt Flaschen