Template talk:Notify me
Discouraging use of Commons talk pages for Commons discussions considered harmful
[edit]What? We have a template encouraging this behaviour? English, Polish and Spanish Wikipedia are not Wikimedia Commons. Demanding that Commons discussions take place there is about as reasonable as asking notification on one's Facebook page. It's a long-standing principle on Wikimedia projects that discouraging use of one's talk page (and that includes diverting such use elsewhere) is unacceptable.
- Users who can't be bothered to check their user talk pages should enable e-mail notifications. It takes all of three clicks.
- Users who can't be bothered checking their user talk pages should not expect other users to jump through hoops such as registering on another site or divulging their IP address.
Apart from the rudeness of expecting this burden to be reversed, there are several technical problems with this idea.
- Users of UserMessages.js might not even see such notices, or would be slowed down in their janitorial tasks if they were to cater to them.
- There is no way of using Commons talk page templates outside of Commons, short of copying the wiki code, manually filling in the parameters, and modifying all the links.
- It increases the risk of users being impersonated and of inactive accounts being compromised.
The best course of action would be to have a bot inform users on the page they have requested that this is a bad idea and that they can easily enable e-mail notifications to achieve their objectives without any of the downsides. This should then be followed by the delinking and removal of the template.
I have previously discussed this matter at Commons:Village pump/Archive/2007Mar#Redirected_user_talk_pages and Commons_talk:Talk page guidelines. —LX (talk, contribs) 14:01, 6 October 2007 (UTC)