TL;DR: we are looking for solution that can post messages to user talk pages on any WMF wiki.
We (l10n team) are working on TranslationNotifications extension [1], which allows translators to sign up and choose how they want notifications of new translation requests to be delivered to them. One of the available delivery methods is the user talk page on another wiki.
We have some plans how to implement this. But we are uncertain which solution we should use.
I request your feedback. Please let us know what in your opinion is the best solution, what are the possible problems in each solution or you can even propose another solution.
Here is what we came up with:
Solution 1: Use the LoadBalancer to open connection to the other wiki. * Does WikiPage support editing pages on another databases like this? * This way we culd bypass things like blocked user/protected page unless we check for those
Solution 2: Use the api.php to post to the user talk page. * Has lots of failure cases: ** Connection error/Timeout ** May need to create user account separately ** The account may be protected ** Talk page might be protected
Solution 3: ''Suggest another solution.''
The idea is that we will create a new job in the jobqueue for each user that has to be notified (translation administrator has a special page for sending out the translation requests) and that the job will notify the user by email or posting to his/her talk page depending on what the user wants.
[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/extensions/TranslationNoti...
-Niklas