Page MenuHomePhabricator

Ability to message all users on the wiki
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

This started off as a joke commit https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/104789/ but the ability to message everyone on a wiki is a semi-common question that comes up, So it could be a decent feature to consider including.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz60611

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 22 2014, 2:56 AM
bzimport added a project: MassMessage.
bzimport set Reference to bz60611.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Yeah, and then nobody can come up after a deployment and say "I WAS NOT INFORMED!" :P

Setting this to unconfirmed for now as I'm not sure this is a valid bug.

For small wikis, you can just generate a list of usernames and make an input list using the {{#target:}} parser function. For large wikis, sending a message to every user is probably a very bad idea.

We already have a variety of notices built in to MediaWiki (Anonnotice, Sitenotice, watchlist notices [kind of]) and its extensions (CentralNotice) for the purpose of distributing important information to a wiki community.

Copying Guillaume and Tilman.

I think there are *very few* cases where we actually want to directly contact every possible user on a wiki; the Wikimedia-wide license change a few years ago comes to mind, and I seem to recall that, in that particular case, we sent e-mails to all users using a custom script.

In any case, I don't think we'll ever want to "message" (as in: leave a message on their talk page) every user. What we might want some day is the ability to *notify* every user using the Notifications tool.

It would be less disruptive and invasive than CentralNotice banners, and probably just as effective (and the guidelines for use should be the same as for CentralNotice).

My €0.02.

Bugreporter claimed this task.
Bugreporter subscribed.

I'm declining this for these reason:

  1. In a big wiki like enwiki, MassMessage must talk more than 1 day to inform all users if the server is not overloaded. This is not safe and it's easy to damage a wiki by abusing it.
  2. In a small wiki we already have Special:ListUsers and api.php?action=query&list=allusers. No need to hardcode this feature.