Last modified: 2014-07-10 23:58:33 UTC
I don't think we actually want to do anything about this, but recording it anyway as a possible source of user confusion. When you sign up as a new user you are given more chatty notification preferences than existing users have by default. If you press "restore default settings" you'll go "back" to defaults that you never saw in your account. This could confuse/mislead users who join after the deployment of Echo as they probably don't know their settings started out not default.
True. I wonder if "restore default settings" has a hook.
What we can do is set a cutoff time, which should be echo launch time. During a reset, restore echo setting for users registered after the cutoff time. Of course, we will need a hook to handle this as well
Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/flow/cards/209
Note: The documentation (possibly outdated) is here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Defaults_by_User_Group I tested at Enwiki, and resetting my preferences (on a 2010 test account) does still result in the "Current users" settings (no email at all, everything except "page link" checked for web.). However, I created a new test account, and found that the defaults at Enwiki and MediaWiki.org were completely different. I then created a test account at MediaWiki.org and then visited Enwiki, and the results were reversed. So, it seems to give the 'homewiki' of a user the "New users" settings at signup, but every other wiki they visit gets assigned the "Current users" settings. (Or, possibly it's even more complicated than that, and hundreds of wikis have tweaked their own "New/Current" defaults by now?) (In reply to bsitu from comment #2) > What we can do is set a cutoff time, which should be echo launch time. > During a reset, restore echo setting for users registered after the cutoff > time. Of course, we will need a hook to handle this as well Do we still want to do something like this? If so, are there any concerns or objections? or alternatives? Given the mess described above, I would suggest that we might instead just want to * define a set of sensible defaults for new users, * and apply those settings at all newly-visited wikis, * and use those as the "restore all default" settings. but the questions about the current state of things need clarification, first.
Current discussion at Enwiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Spammy_default_notification_settings
(In reply to Quiddity from comment #4) > So, it seems to give the 'homewiki' of a user the "New users" settings at > signup, but every other wiki they visit gets assigned the "Current users" > settings. Yup, because when the account is autocreated on other wikis, it doesn't use the same hook, which means they use the real default settings.
IMO we should just set sane defaults for all users, new or not. MediaWiki's preferences system is not designed to have different defaults depending on the age of the user, and the current implementation clearly has issues.
Note: I believe the idea behind different defaults was: to avoid overwhelming us powerusers with too many notification emails, but at the same time to give maximum feedback and retention-y-ness [notaword] to new-editors. Any changes we make, ought to keep that balance in mind.
Change 145473 had a related patch set uploaded by Legoktm: Use new UserResetAllOptions hook for new users https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/145473
