On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Dan Collins en.wp.st47@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 19, 2011 8:20 AM, "Tim Starling" tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 19/04/11 19:38, Milos Rancic wrote:
MZMcBride's email about emails reminded me that every automated email from Wikimedia servers looks like a bunch of programming code.
The first idea was that it would be better to have some better
formatted
emails with some more information (for example, I would like to see
diff
inside of my email when I get notification about changing my talk
page).
The main problem is that they are plain text instead of HTML.
This is most certainly /not/ a problem. What would be a problem would be if MediaWiki chose to jump on the bandwagon of embedding huge external images in emails to users. Bandwidth? Tracking? Smaller screens (mobile)? Text interfaces?
Every HTML email should come with an embedded plaintext version which will display in the event the HTML is unrenderable. Explanation here: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/why-bother-with-plain-text-emails/
Looking at my most recent email from LinkedIn, it provides a list of updates from the people I know, each illustrated with a thumbnail picture of them, along with new connections which have been made in my network and posts people have made. The marketing reason for this is to get people to interact with the site by telling them interesting things that have happened.
That is actually almost identical to a selection of changes to watched pages, new pages, and watched talk pages. We also have quite a powerful reason to remind people to get involved with our projects - we know new editors are unlikely to come back. So should we take a leaf from LinkedIn's book here?
Chris (User:The Land)