Allow users to input a Category and use all the pages in it as targets.
Ideally we should use the same input box as the existing one, so we might want to prevent users from using {{#target:}} in NS_CATEGORY since the form would ignore those.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
(In reply to comment #1)
I'm not sure what the user interface for this should look like.
Couldn't we use the same form at Special:MassMessage, only introducing e.g.
Category:User_ru
at "Page containing list of pages to leave a message on:" ?
In this example, the message would be delivered to the talk pages of https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:User_ru
(In reply to comment #2)
Couldn't we use the same form at Special:MassMessage, only introducing e.g.
Category:User_ru
at "Page containing list of pages to leave a message on:" ?
So this single text input would accept either a category name or an input page list title? That might work.
Just in case it helps, some examples of why this feature is useful:
One question though is what to do with subcategories under the selected category. Discard them? Go just one level down? There is some risk of ending up spamming a lot more people than you initially expected.
(In reply to comment #4)
Just in case it helps, some examples of why this feature is useful:
- Posting to discussion pages of articles under a common category.
- Contacting users by language through Babel (e.g. [[w:Category:User es]])
and
through userboxes (usually generating categories e.g.
[[w:Category:Wikipedians
interested in astronomy]]).
Thanks for these examples! The first one is especially interesting, although I'm wondering how MassMessage would know to use the associated talk pages instead of the articles in that category directly.
One question though is what to do with subcategories under the selected
category. Discard them? Go just one level down? There is some risk of ending
up
spamming a lot more people than you initially expected.
True; perhaps bug 57472 ("MassMessage preview should output the number of recipients") will help with that.
(In reply to comment #5)
(In reply to comment #4)
- Contacting users by language through Babel (e.g. [[w:Category:User es]])
[...]
Thanks for these examples! The first one is especially interesting, although
I'm wondering how MassMessage would know to use the associated talk pages
instead of the articles in that category directly.
MassMessage already changes "User:Foo" inputs to "User talk:Foo". That is, MassMessage will not post to a page in the User namespace due to $wgNamespacesToConvert being set (cf. [[mw:Extension:MassMessage]]).
The first example was
- Posting to discussion pages of articles under a common category.
What Tilman is askig is whether MassMessage would always post to discussion pages of articles within a category, never to the article itself.
For most cases MM always wants to past in the Talk pages, isn't it. The only exceptions I can think of are village pumps and the like, where the page itself is dedicated to discuss.
(In reply to comment #7)
The first example was
- Posting to discussion pages of articles under a common category.
What Tilman is asking is whether MassMessage would always post to discussion
pages of articles within a category, never to the article itself.
Oh, sorry about that.
Posting to article talk pages was never considered as part of the design or architecture of MassMessage. You'd have to play around with it or read the code to be sure, but I imagine it won't work well without a bit of additional coding. As I recall, if you try to post to the article namespace, it'll just get logged as a skip currently. On the other hand, I think talk pages are often categorized. You could simply use those categories instead.
For most cases MM always wants to past in the Talk pages, isn't it. The only
exceptions I can think of are village pumps and the like, where the page
itself is dedicated to discuss.
There are other quirks. For example, Meta-Wiki actually has a few discussion boards in the main (article) namespace. But generally speaking talk pages are for talk, yes. :-)
Change 120334 had a related patch set uploaded by Wctaiwan:
Add ability to deliver to all pages in a category
Change 120334 merged by jenkins-bot:
Add ability to deliver to all pages in a category