When I get an email for a changed page on my watchlist, if the page title contains certain characters (e.g. a full stop/period <.>), then Gmail renders the link only up until the full stop.
For example:
- Someone edits this en.Wikisource page:
- I get an email notifying me that it's changed, in plaintext, including this url:
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Lancashire_Legends,_Traditions,_Pageants,_Sports,_Etc.,_with_an_Appendix_Containing_a_Rare_Tract.djvu/258
- Gmail renders this plaintext url into html, with the following link, followed by unlinked text:
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Lancashire_Legends,_Traditions,_Pageants,_Sports,_Etc.,_with_an_Appendix_Containing_a_Rare_Tract.djvu/258
This seems to be because of the way that Gmail tries to make sense of plaintext urls (assuming it's the end of a sentence), rather than a bug in the email notification system (Extension:Email notification?), but it means that all of our users who use Gmail (probably a not insignificant number), and I guess many other email systems which try to parse these plaintext urls will be inconvenienced where page titles have these characters in them (it makes these emails very irritating!)
I couldn't find any bug reports or feature requests on MediaWiki or here about this, and there could also be all sorts of other circumstances when this extension sends out emails with urls that contain characters that major email clients don't render correctly that we're not aware of.
How much work would it be to provide an option to send these email notifications out in html instead of plaintext? And how many new users do you think would be negatively affected if this became the default at sign-up?