[Commons-l] Principles of organisation - who do we serve?

Fri Nov 10 23:17:50 UTC 2006

"Anthony" wrote:
> Turning on email notification when you get a message on your talk page
> would be a good solution in the mean time.  In fact, for some people
> (like myself) who don't check their Wikipedia talk page that much
> either, it might even be a better solution.
>
> I believe this email notification has already been coded up.  What
> would be the problems with turning it on?  Can someone be specific
> here and answer exactly why it hasn't been turned on?  How many
> additional servers would be needed to support it?
>
> Anthony

I guess the problem of email notification could be a lot of emails being 
sent.
But email notification wouldn't be necessary. When the Single User Login
gets implemented, it'd be easy to have a second "You have new messages"
text.
Someone edits your user talk: The newmessages bit is sent on that wiki and
a newmessages counter is incremented on the central user table.
When you're at a wiki you can get two messages: "You have new messages
on this wiki" or "You have new messages on another wiki" (counter != 0)
The second wouldn't show if the first is shown and the count is 1 (most
messages will be received and sent on its main wiki). When he sees his local
talk page, if the local newmessages flag was set, the global counter is
decremented (better make sure it never gets negative numbers...).

The link of "new messages anywhere else" would send you to a page similar
to the CheckUsage, where the full wikis are checked for your user to see if
you have a new message there (there can be multiple matches). That would
be the only case where it's ?(n) 