[Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[Steven Walling]

I really really wish we could thanks IPs too. It sucks to treat them like
second class citizens.

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 6:32 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <
amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> Something like the "new message" orange bar :)
>
> I guess that designers and Growth people may know an answer, but all
> thoughts are welcome.
>

With my "product manager for Growth" hat on... Like Kaldari said we can't
give people who aren't logged in Echo notifications at the moment. The only
alternative is to post to the IP talk page. This would require us to
basically build a user account, i.e. a bot, in to Thanks to deliver a Talk
page message for the IP. That's probably not going to happen, to be honest,
and there isn't the manpower behind Echo right now to design/build proper
anonymous notifications. If you're gung-ho about this idea I think Nemo is
right, just use the Talk page. :)

My instinct here is to try and use this as an experimental tool for showing
IPs the advantages of logging in. That is, show them an "unclaimed" account
with thank you or other notification, then prompt them to sign up after
they read it. This would give us temporary anonymous notifications and also
show people what they would get for taking a moment to sign up. This kind
of technique is extremely powerful for demonstrating the value in
registering for a site, and you can similar examples in many other places,
such as Twitter's "log in and tweet" flow that happens if you use one of
their share buttons on a news article etc.

If you look at our draft (emphasis on the draft) documentation at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition you will see us
mentioning ideas like the "proto-account" that Tim brought up as well.
(Just to poke at the technical issue Marc brought up... is there any reason
we wouldn't use Redis for this? It seems well suited to storing high
volumes of data we would intend to be temporary.)