[Wikipedia-l] Talk pages for anonymous users

[Erik Moeller]

One of the most requested features has been a way to contact anonymous
users. I have added this functionality to the Wikipedia software, and it is now
running on our test server:

http://test.wikipedia.org

You will notice that every user, anonymous or not, now has a "Talk" link
behind their username in the Recent Changes list. In the case of anons, this
leads to a page Talk:123.123.123.123 (IP address). Both anons and signed in
users get a notification if their talk page has been changed. Instead of the old
"Talk*" link, this is now a text message stating "You have new messages",
linking to the talk page.

I would appreciate it if you could test this by putting messages on each
other's talk pages on test.wikipedia.org (most of us don't have an account
there, which is an advantage here), before we put it on the live Wikipedia. Note
that there are also some new texts to translate.

A talk page can be shared by several people with the same IP address. To
help people understand this, an automatic info text is appended to all talk
pages for anonymous users. Since the Wikipedia software does not "know" much
about the pages it stores, any page of the pattern "User talk:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" (x
being 1-3 digits) is interpreted to be such a page; if you, for whatever
reason, create one by hand, it will also get the warning text.

Note that it's currently possible to create an account like "172" or even
"172.148.23.23", and some people might do so for nostalgic reasons. In my
opinion, we should block the creation of usernames without letters in them (need
to make sure that this works on the non-English Wikipedias, of course). Any
objections?

Regards,

Erik

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