Hi,
one of our problems in dealing with vandals is that we can't reliably talk
to them. They may read the changelog, but it's quite possible that they
don't. They may see the article Talk page, but it's quite probable that
they have already moved on to the next one.
We already have a user talk page change notification mechanism in place,
but we currently don't use it for anons. How about this: next to the IP
number in recent changes, we would make a link to User
Talk:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. This would be created if it doesn't exist. Anonymous
users would then by default get notifications when their Talk pages have
been changed.
This isn't reliable, because several users can share an IP. But that's not
a problem -- it's really not a big deal if someone reads a message not
intended for them, and we could include a standard disclaimer: "Please
note: Sometimes several users share one IP address. These messages might
not be addressed to you -- in that case, please ignore them." At least it
would allow us to talk to anons, which I believe would help in many cases,
or keep them busy.
I also suggest changing the somewhat unfriendly "*" indicator to something
more obvious, like
(Talk)
when there are no new messages and
(Talk - new messages)
when there are.
What do you think? The only problem I see is that these talk pages might
be obsolete after a day or so, but if that ever becomes a problem, we
could clean them up automatically.
Regards,
Erik