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

Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki at gmail.com
Sat Apr 28 06:38:54 UTC 2012


Bod Notbod, 28/04/2012 01:29:
 > So the feature sends out one email per watchlist edit?

No, one email per watchlisted *page* edited. If there are hundreds of 
edits to a single page, you'll receive only one email.

Andrew Gray, 28/04/2012 01:46:
> On 27 April 2012 22:27, Federico Leva (Nemo) 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.

Sure, this is the easiest part. If the default for the checkbox is 
changed, it changes only for new users (as opposed to defaults in the 
dropdown options, like thumb size), as far as I know/remember (but I'm 
not a dev).

> 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?

This was already done by en.wiki for user talk notifications by changing 
[[MediaWiki:Enotif body]] to explain the "new" thing.

Nemo



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