Right now, the wikimedia-emailauth-login-help message that is displayed on the EmailAuth challenge form instructs the user to contact ca@ if they no longer have access to the email account they registered with. Trust-and-Safety would like to replace this with a Zendesk form.
Once the Zendesk form is ready, we should change this message to link to the Zendesk form instead.
We should also consider what we want to do with the existing translations of this message (it's been translated to 16 languages besides English already). If we just update the English version of the message and don't do anything else, users in those 16 languages will continue to see the old version referring to ca@, until a translator comes along and re-translates the message. If that is undesirable and we want to funnel people into the new form faster, we could consider deleting the existing translations (or creating a new message with a new name), so that users will instead see the correct link but in English (until someone translates it).
The new message will have two targets:
Ideally these would be the same. The Zendesk form is a stopgap until we get the native form up.
Currently this reads:
Contact ca@wikimedia.org if you no longer have access to your account's email address.
I would suggest:
If you are having trouble receiving the code, [[$1|follow these instructions]].
... With a link to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Account_recovery and then eventually to the MediaWiki form, which can also have a short blurb with instructions.
No. I'm hopeful it will only be necessary for a short period.
Mentioned this elsewhere but I think this is a short enough message that we should just delete it and direct everyone to the Meta page.
Change #1187473 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mmartorana; author: Mmartorana):
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@master] i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help message
Unfortunately it was technically difficult to add a $1 parameter to this message, because the original EmailAuth message that we're overriding doesn't have any parameters. So we chose to just hard-code the link target in the message, which now reads:
If you are having trouble receiving the code, [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Account_recovery follow these instructions].
Once the MediaWiki form is ready, we'll have to update the link target, and we'll unfortunately have to bulk-update the translations, but I think it's better to do that once than to jump through a bunch of hoops to set up a configurable parameter for something that's temporary.
Change #1187473 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@master] i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help message
T390657: Documentation: Create and link to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:EmailAuth was requesting a link to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:EmailAuth like the non overridden version has... Is this still warranted with the change here?
Change #1187511 had a related patch set uploaded (by Reedy; author: Reedy):
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@master] WikimediaOverrides: Add Special:MyLanguage to meta link in wikimedia-emailauth-login-help
Change #1187511 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@master] WikimediaOverrides: Add Special:MyLanguage to meta link in wikimedia-emailauth-login-help
This is merged now and requests are coming through, so I'm calling this particular task Resolved. There remains some confusion on T390657.
Change #1203066 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mmartorana; author: Mmartorana):
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@master] i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery
Change #1203066 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@master] i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery
Change #1203097 had a related patch set uploaded (by Catrope; author: Mmartorana):
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.1] i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery
Change #1203097 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages@wmf/1.46.0-wmf.1] i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-10T23:08:28Z] <catrope@deploy2002> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:rMW1203097935b3|i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery (T399749)]], [[gerrit:1203126|OATHManage: Don't always set the page title to "Create new recovery codes"]], [[gerrit:1203535|OATHAuth: Increase 2FA opt-in to 70% of users (T399664)]]
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-10T23:34:11Z] <catrope@deploy2002> catrope, mstyles: Backport for [[gerrit:rMW1203097935b3|i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery (T399749)]], [[gerrit:1203126|OATHManage: Don't always set the page title to "Create new recovery codes"]], [[gerrit:1203535|OATHAuth: Increase 2FA opt-in to 70% of users (T399664)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can no
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-11T00:11:51Z] <catrope@deploy2002> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:rMW1203097935b3|i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery (T399749)]], [[gerrit:1203126|OATHManage: Don't always set the page title to "Create new recovery codes"]], [[gerrit:1203535|OATHAuth: Increase 2FA opt-in to 70% of users (T399664)]]
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-11T00:15:28Z] <catrope@deploy2002> catrope, mstyles: Backport for [[gerrit:rMW1203097935b3|i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery (T399749)]], [[gerrit:1203126|OATHManage: Don't always set the page title to "Create new recovery codes"]], [[gerrit:1203535|OATHAuth: Increase 2FA opt-in to 70% of users (T399664)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can no
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-11T00:22:47Z] <catrope@deploy2002> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:rMW1203097935b3|i18n: Update wikimedia-emailauth-login-help to link to Special:AccountRecovery (T399749)]], [[gerrit:1203126|OATHManage: Don't always set the page title to "Create new recovery codes"]], [[gerrit:1203535|OATHAuth: Increase 2FA opt-in to 70% of users (T399664)]] (duration: 10m 56s)