I saw this over vacation and have been meaning to respond.<br><br>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.<br>

<br>Does anyone have the answer to question #1 below (why email is optional in the first place?).<br><br>Howie <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 12:59 AM, Thehelpfulone <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:thehelpfulonewiki@gmail.com" target="_blank">thehelpfulonewiki@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br>

<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Hi guys,<div><br></div><div>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 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ACUX_user_test_2.ogv" target="_blank">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ACUX_user_test_2.ogv</a> 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&#39;t have to give it, and that she never gave optional information.</div>



<div><br></div><div>A couple of questions:</div><div><br></div><div>1) Does anyone know why we made email optional in the first place - was it because it wasn&#39;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?</div>



<div><br></div><div>2) With Echo and Flow and all the new notification stuff that is planned, and given <a href="https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Email_notifications" target="_blank">Email notifications  </a>still play a big part of it, should we be considering trying to actually get <i>more </i>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?</div>



<div><br></div><div>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 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Account_creation_test_2.ogv" target="_blank">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Account_creation_test_2.ogv</a>.</div>



<div><div><br></div><div>If this discussion has already been had, apologies - I&#39;ve just joined this list and couldn&#39;t find anything from a brief skim of the archives.</div><div><br></div><div>Ryan</div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">

-- <br>Thehelpfulone<div><a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone" target="_blank">http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Thehelpfulone</a></div>
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