[Wikimedia-l] Watchlist email notifications enabled on all wikis

[Andrew Gray]

On 27 April 2012 22:27, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> The only inconvenience is that both new and old users still have to manually
> enable the feature on their preferences, while it would make more sense to
> make it opt-out, as for user talk: users want to disable it only on the very
> few wikis they monitor very closely, when/if the watchlist gets crowded and
> would generate too much spam. Some thought is needed to address this pat of
> the problem because of course we don't want to suddenly send thousands of
> emails to the super-users with (tens of?) thousands of pages in their
> watchlist before they opt-out.

Would it be possible to have it like SUL - if you create an account
after X date it is automatically watchlist-email-enabled, if you have
an older account you have to manually turn it on.

The problem then becomes notifying people that they can have emailed
watchlist alerts, as without some form of notification we'll be having
people saying "wait, we can do that?" in 2015...

Perhaps a way to do it would be to trigger a *single* email to a user
who doesn't have it enabled, at the time their first "triggered"
watchlist edit would be sent out, informing them of the system and
inviting them to turn it on if desired, with an explicit statement
that unless they do, there won't be any further emails?

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