Last modified: 2014-04-25 23:26:27 UTC
MassMessage's notion of "targets" is not very user-friendly: - Subscribers have to manually add their name in a special syntax on multiple wiki pages. This makes the whole thing very hard to discover, and makes it difficult to manage your subscriptions. - Senders have to remember target-lists rather than being able to re-use common targets easily. I think we can leave the current system in place and complement it with a more user-friendly one: * a list of newsletters, newsletter descriptions and target pages in the MediaWiki: namespace * a tab in preferences that renders these out and makes it easy for users to subscribe with their user talk: page (bonus points for indicating number of subscribers) Ideally the tab should expose both local and global newsletters under a "Subscriptions" tab in preferences This seems like it could be a useful way to complement Echo notifications with an easy-to-use opt-in subscription system for more comprehensive newsletters. Newsletters posted on village pumps and such could then simply link to the relevant tab in preferences for easy opt-in.
Quick Note: There are related discussion threads (and listings) at these locations https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:MassMessage https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Newsletter (#Drafting specs, in particular) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Movement_broadcasting (#See also, in particular) http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/ee/2014-January/000864.html I'd suggest moving this issue into an RfC draft at mediawiki, for collaborative editing. (Or something) See also bug 57935 and bug 43840 and bug 57937 (I won't add those to the Seealso-field here, to avoid spam. But once an onwiki location is chosen, someone should ping those bugs).
(In reply to Erik Moeller from comment #0) > MassMessage's notion of "targets" is not very user-friendly: Yes. There's actually a GSoC project to fix this: [[mw:Extension:MassMessage/Page input list improvements]] > - Subscribers have to manually add their name in a special syntax on > multiple wiki pages. This makes the whole thing very hard to discover, and > makes it difficult to manage your subscriptions. > > - Senders have to remember target-lists rather than being able to re-use > common targets easily. What do you mean by "common targets"? > > I think we can leave the current system in place and complement it with a > more user-friendly one: > > * a list of newsletters, newsletter descriptions and target pages in the > MediaWiki: namespace Once we switch to the ContentHandler based method, we can just use a special page to automate this. > > * a tab in preferences that renders these out and makes it easy for users to > subscribe with their user talk: page (bonus points for indicating number of > subscribers) I don't think this should be implemented with user preferences (that's bug 57935), but that shouldn't prevent us from listing them in Special:Preferences.
