Deliver user messages
It is often required to deliver messages to users. But users are registered via a pseudonym, so we do not always have their e-mail address. Other users did not register an e-mail address, or disabled mail delivery.
Techniques
[edit]The following techniques exist:
- send external e-mail, but then you need to know the e-mail address
- send internal e-mail, via MediaWiki (Wikimedia username required)
- post a message to the user talk page (Wikimedia username required)
All techniques can be done manually, or automatically (via a Python script).
Procedure
[edit]You could start to obtain a list of users for which you have an external e-mail address.
Then you can try to send an internal e-mail. There is a quota of e-mails that you can send per day, so you better sort the list by descending importance. You could try multiple projects. Users are only active on certain projects/languages.
For the rest of the non-delivered e-mail list, and the users who did not register an e-mail address, or disabled e-mail delivery, you can deliver a message to the talk page.
All techniques can be automated via a Python script.