Releasing or changing the special treatment of user_talk pages would cause other
changes related to watch-listed pages, especially feature 454 (enotif of changes
to pages and user_talk pages), but would probably make the program and database
structure easier.

User talk pages *are* special cased, inherently, as that is their purpose.

I again propose for next releases:

• drop the table newtalk and the mechanism around, but
• treat user-talk pages as any other page, and
• add automatically a watchlist entry for a user_talk:X page ehen user X opens

an account.

Thus, any user_talk:X page is nothing else then an automatically added watched
page for user X in the table watchlist.

This issue is now finally solved with the new Enotif version 2.00 for CVS
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454 scheduled for publication on
30.11.2004 .

The table user_newtalk is finally dropped: it is simply no longer needed; all
references to that table in the code have been deleted. All user_newtalk actions
are handled transparently via the watchlist table by using entries in that table.

The user interface (i.e. message "You have new messages") and behaviour is
unchanged (100% unchanged).

The code is much cleaner and understandable.
Changes in UserTalkUpdate in conformity with new database wrapper calls and with
Enotif switches and options.