Last modified: 2014-08-23 18:25:57 UTC
Occasionally someone will enable a new gadget and make it enabled for everyone with the ability for individual users to opt-out. It would be nice if MediaWiki somehow notified the user (when visiting Special:Preferences or via e-mail or in some other way) that a new gadget had been enabled (without the user's consent) and explain to the user how to disable the gadget, should they wish to. Even a "New!" tag next to newly enabled gadgets might be sufficient. I'm not sure. The current practice of silently changing other users' user preferences seems fairly unacceptable, though.
To be clear, the use-case we're primarily trying to address here is when a user (experienced or not) visits the "Gadgets" section of Special:Preferences and goes "the hell? I didn't enable this."
That would be a nice feature, however compared to how it was (dump everything in Common.js without user consent), the addition of [default] for Gadgets is an improvement to that. Changing to a low priority enhancement request.
I don't suppose that Echo has a broadcast feature that would enable a sysop when adding a new default gadget to broadcast a single message to everyone notifying them of this, does it?
Echo could be a good way of doing this type of notification. It could be triggered automatically when a user's enabled gadgets change without them visiting preferences (because a change to the defaults caused a gadget to be enabled or disabled). The user would have the option on how to receive such notifications in preferences (web, e-mail, both or not at all). For users who log in infrequently, there might be several relevant changes for them next time they log in, so it would be a good idea to batch the notifications rather than giving a separate notification for every change (I'm not sure how feasible this would be). At the very least we should avoid things like "gadget X has been enabled; gadget X has been disabled"; the user doesn't need to know this since the net difference is no change to them.
I was thinking that changes to certain interface pages that directly effects performance would trigger it, I'm sure that [[MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition]] doesn't get changed that often...
Echo wouldn't really scale here, I don't think. If you change a gadget from being opt-in to opt-out on a large wiki (e.g., the English Wikipedia), you would be notifying several million accounts. Ouch. Really this could be solved by local administrators simply (temporarily) noting that a gadget was recently enabled in the gadget description. But this is tedious.
For that matter, on a wiki as large as wikipedia, it could be something noted in the watchlist notice so that it could be dismissable. I could be posted there for a month or three and anyone that was away longer than that would be less likely to remember what they had their gadget settings at and should likely check anyways... :p This is looking like it will be a wontfix/worksforme type bug...
(In reply to comment #7) > For that matter, on a wiki as large as wikipedia, it could be something noted > in the watchlist notice so that it could be dismissable. I could be posted > there for a month or three and anyone that was away longer than that would be > less likely to remember what they had their gadget settings at and should > likely check anyways... :p This is looking like it will be a > wontfix/worksforme type bug... Abusing the watchlist notice for this doesn't make sense. Ideally the Gadgets extension would support this feature natively. Perhaps in Gadgets 2.0.
