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?).
Howie
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 12:59 AM, Thehelpfulone <thehelpfulonewiki(a)gmail.com
Hi guys,
Sending this to the main EE list as I imagine E2 may also have some useful
input. I just watched one of the account creation videos from the
UserTesting.com dashboard which Steven also published at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ACUX_user_test_2.ogv and an
interesting point that the tester made was that she was happy that the
email address was optional, because that meant that she didn't have to give
it, and that she never gave optional information.
A couple of questions:
1) Does anyone know why we made email optional in the first place - was it
because it wasn't a core part of the wiki functionality given that it was
previously only used for password resets, or was it something to do with
storing the least amount of data about our users as possible?
2) With Echo and Flow and all the new notification stuff that is planned,
and given Email notifications
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Email_notifications>still
play a big part of it, should we be considering trying to actually get *more
*email addresses for users who sign up and so either make it less clear
that email is optional (probably not so good from a usability standpoint?)
or even go so far as to make email required?
As an alternative to this we could give reasons why providing your email
address is a good, but I worry that putting too much detail on the new
account creation page would cause a TL;DR like the tester made quite clear
at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Account_creation_test_2.ogv.
If this discussion has already been had, apologies - I've just joined this
list and couldn't find anything from a brief skim of the archives.
Ryan
--
Thehelpfulone
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone
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