[Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[MZMcBride]

Steven Walling wrote:
>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.

I don't follow what you're saying about a bot account being the only
alternative. You can use the exact same user interface exposure (i.e.,
little "(thanks)" links) and simply post to the IP's talk page rather than
creating an Echo (logged-in user) notification. I can't see any need for a
separate bot account.

>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. :)

Ignoring Echo and the Thanks extension-specific logging, if I had to
guess, I imagine strictly adding in the ability to thank anonymous users
would take about thirty minutes of work. We've had a stable API for
posting talk page messages for years and the user interface code is
already written and deployed. As far as I can tell, you'd simply do a
quick check after someone clicks the thanks link and then clicks "ok" that
goes something like...

if ( target user is anon ) { post to IP talk page }

else if ( target user is logged in ) { send Echo notification }

If you're gung-ho about implementing the ability to thank anonymous users,
I think the correct answer is to submit a changeset with proposed
modifications to the Thanks extension to make that dream a reality.

MZMcBride