MassMessage should support substituting templates before delivery (on the wiki the message is delivered from, i.e. Meta in case of WMF). Not substituted templates can cause all sorts of issues since there’s no guarantee that they will work the same, or even exist, on the target wiki. This basically means that no templates can be used while composing the message, which sometimes results in a huge multiplication of efforts, for example in the case of the Tech News (see discussion about demultiplication efforts on m:Talk:Tech/News/init). Although it’s most useful in case of translatable templates, there’s no need to constrain this feature to translatable templates: non-translatable templates like {{@}} can be just as useful when drafting the message, but just as unreliable when delivering (for example, {{@}} could be an alias of {{reply to}} on some wikis instead of an email address obfuscating template).
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This is not a subtask (as in: requirement) by definition; please also review subscribers before copying all of them and creating notifications - thanks!
It is a requirement for Tech News distribution to be fully supported without wasting anyone’s time. Also, I think subscribers of that task are potentially interested in this as well, and are of course free to unsubscribe themselves.
@Tacsipacsi: Does support for substituting templates require using Special:MassMessage?
Substituting templates while distributing them with MassMessage obviously requires using Special:MassMessage, and this is what this task asks for.
Substituting them right on the page about to be distributed is, of course, independent of MassMessage, but that solution serves the purpose much less:
- It requires an extra step, while the goal of T254481 is to get rid of as many extra steps as possible.
- This solution isn’t tool-supported either right now, so one has to go through translated units and substitute eventual templates in translated parts manually one by one.
- Substitution in non-translated parts isn’t even possible unless the basic workflow of MediaWiki-extensions-Translate is changed—you can run s/{{/{{subst:/ on the translation page, but that transcludes English text wherever the translation depends on page language, and then that English text is synced into all translations, regardless of whether a translation exists. (Also, this substitution freezes the template state even on the source wiki, where there’s no reason to do so and to exclude the benefits of further improvements to the templates.)
I am removing the parent project, because we are concluding that work. Leaving this open as an independent feature request.
So you’re basically declining this (at least for now). Since T254481 takes the possibility for custom hacks away, it should support them natively. I do my best translating Tech News each week, but I’m getting burned out in not doing any creative work but just copying translations from last week 80% of the time. And it’s impossible to improve this situation without fixing this ticket (or switching back to the module-based hack).
@Krzysiek_123456789: Welcome! Could you explain your last edits please (and subscribing more people)? Thanks.
It's possible to use subst to substitute messages if the pages to deliver to are on the same wiki. This seems to be about sending the pages cross-wiki, so I've renamed the task to reflect this.