On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Since the features of the extension are disabled for
unregistered users
already
Is this a design decision, or just to simplify implementation? You
could use a cookie or something, but if you did that you'd have to
make sure Squid doesn't serve pages differently because of it.
Does anyone actually object to the addition of a
disable drafts feature?
Yes. For virtually any feature imaginable, there will be some
minority of users who don't like it. That does not imply that we
should add a user preference to disable every single feature we add.
Every extra user preference clutters up the user preferences screen,
making it harder to use; and adds more code paths, making bugs harder
to track down.
In this case, as far as I can tell, the only thing disabling the
feature for a given user would do is hide one button from the UI. We
already have a mechanism by which users can do things like that if
they really care: they can use a CSS rule in their user stylesheet.
Or, they could just ignore the button, which doesn't seem like an
excessive hardship. If the extension is adding lots of annoying
interface elements when the user actually has no drafts saved, that's
possibly a problem that should be fixed for all users of the
extension.