On 01/10/2013 05:57 PM, Howie Fung wrote:
I saw this over vacation and have been meaning to respond.
I think Thehelpfulone raises a very important point. Echo does rely in email notifications. Also, email is where users actually are and until new users get into the habit of coming to our sites directly, email is a way to draw them back in.
Does anyone have the answer to question #1 below (why email is optional in the first place?).
It's been like that as long as I can remember. It has been used for Special:EmailUser for a long time, though, so it's not true that it was recently only for resets.
I assume the answer is a tautology, "so people don't have to give their email". Probably, the goal was to encourage signups by minimizing the required personal information.
But it's clearly a trade-off. If they don't have an email, they can't use password reset (which alone is important), and things like Echo emails will not work out of the box.
Matt Flaschen