To keep people (and our servers) from being overwhelmed with email when/if we turn on email notifications for watchlists, we should allow users to throttle the messages so that we combine all notifications into a once daily or once weekly message.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
bugs wrote:
Title: Throttle enotify messages => Enotify message digests
Throttle = something enforced on everyone to prevent abuse (I think there's another bug for that already too)
Digest = when a user chooses to receive emails in scheduled batches, rather than as they happen, so they're easier to digest
bugs wrote:
Oh, you added this as a blocker to the EnotifWatchlist enabling bug. In that case, I thunk we have multiple things going on here: the throttle and the digest. A throttle would stop the servers from sending too many emails. The digest option would let people choose how often they receive emails. We should probably make our setup more sophisticated and offer both, or just default to an "hourly digest" or something like that, rather than offering an inatanteous email.
I don't think this is a blocker at all: if you don't want to receive enotifs because you have too many pages in your watchlist, you just won't enable it. And if you want to enable it by default, just avoid doing so for users with more than n pages in their watchlist (with n = 100 or something, probably).
Besides, it might be only me but I wouldn't like the digest at all: the subject of those emails is the most useful piece of information they contain, just saving me from pressing del some times wouldn't be worth the additional skimming time at all.
Moreover, does it make sense at all to have a digest of changes on your email box? If you have a lot of watchlisted pages which have been changed and you want to check them, Special:Watchlist is what you need; enotifs are useful when visiting Special:Watchlist is not worth the effort for you (typically, because there's not much to see and you won't visit it, limiting yourself to your biggest watchlist if any).