[Commons-l] Automatic messages to users: guessing userpreferredlanguage

[Andrew Gray]

On 07/10/2007, Alex Nordstrom <lx at se.linux.org> wrote:
> Sunday, 7 October 2007, David Gerard wrote:
> > You appear to be taking great offence at them not accepting the means
> > most convenient to *you*.
>
> It's not quite that arbitrary. You can't really equate the effort of
> checking for and complying with such demands every time you need to
> leave someone a message with the effort of ticking a checkbox.

...a checkbox many people don't know is there.

I just ticked it for the first time ever. Mind you, I don't think I'd
ever even looked at my Commons preferences page before, given it still
has two things I try to remember to fix (time offsets and equation
rendering)...

Case study time!

I have a note on my Commons talkpage (with its two whole messages in a
year and a half) saying "you'll probably get a quicker response via
[enwp talkpage]". It's there because when I set up a Commons account I
didn't know about email notifications for page edits (indeed, they may
not have been enabled) and, let's face it, I would never have heard
about them without the fact that I happened to subscribe to commons-l
one day.

My putting a note up isn't a "demand" to be complied with - and I
don't think anyone else in my situation really thinks of it as one.
It's a courtesy to Commons; "I don't come by here much, and when I do
I'm often not logged in, so if you need to communicate with me, here's
a way to reach me".

I am unsure exactly what I've done wrong. Clearly, if I was more
involved in Commons, I might have heard that there were other ways of
ensuring I heard about people wanting to communicate with me on
Commons. But, if I was involved enough to have heard about those
methods, I'd be involved enough to log in there more than once every
few weeks.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk