Community Tech/Thanks notification for log entries

This page documents a project the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team has worked on or declined in the past. Technical work on this project is complete.

We invite you to join the discussion on the talk page. You may track this project's progress on T60485.

This is the project page for Thanks notification for log entries, the #7 wish in the 2017 Community Wishlist Survey. You can follow this page and get updates as the Community Tech team starts working on this wish.

Thanks for log entries has now been deployed all on projects. You can check it out on Special:Log. The whitelist for which entries are thankable can be found in phab:T60485.

This project is still in development, but is second priority to other projects. We hope to complete it by June 2018.

This week, code was released that allows users to send Thanks from Special:Log for items that have associated revisions, such as page moves and protects.

Development on the project is underway. phab:T60485 and the bottom of this page contain a list of what will be thankable and what won't be, by default. This list is modifiable, based on feedback. The Epic ticket also links to all of the development ticket that are being worked on.

There are a lot of logs, some of which are permissioned and some of which can be partially or entirely suppressed/oversighted. Because of this, we've decided that logs and log conditions must be manually made thankable (opt-in), rather than making all logs thankable and removing the logs that are not appropriate (opt-out). We feel this will limit any possible inappropriate situations to send a 'thanks.'

The notification will be worded as: "User:Alice thanked you for your action: User:Bob deleted page Wrongpage" (If Alice thanked Bob for deleting page Wrongpage). A screenshot for how the notification will look can be found here. Please note that there will not be a link to the "Action" itself, as incorrectly depicted in that screenshot. This is because there is no reliable way to link to individual logging actions currently.

The feature will not have an additional preference. It will work in accordance with the existing "Mention" notification preferences.

We hope to have a first version of this ready to test in a beta environment sometime in March.

Primary use cases for this feature: uploading images, renames, page protects.

We will likely want to opt-out actions that are inappropriate to thank for, like blocking or thanks. Phab:T60485 already has some comments about what should and should not be thankable.

We'll have to change "Send public thanks for this edit" message to "Send public thanks for this action" and audit for other uses of the word 'edit' in the features' message strings.

We'll also want to make sure it hooks up with the existing preferences on the 'Notifications' tab of Special:Preferences: the ticbox toggle for notifications and the User Mute list.

For the investigation:

• Make an implementation plan

The team will start investigating this project early in 2018. If you've got suggestions or questions, please write your thoughts on the talk page!

• Wishlist proposal, discussion and votes
• Phabricator tickets tracking the work: phab:T60485
  • Investigation: T184309

xx

• Log items of log types below should be thankable, similar to edits.
• The existing notifications preferences should be respected
• New logs must opt-in to the 'thanks' feature, and should not be thankable by default
• The message for the notification will read:
• User:Foo thanked you for your action: User:bar deleted page XYZ

Note the master list is at phab:T60485

Edits to abuse filters (not to be confused with users hitting an abuse filter)

• Content model change log
• Deletion log
• GWToolset log
• Global account log
• Global rename log
• Global rights log
• Import log
• Mass message log
• Merge log
• OAuth consumer log
• Page translation log
• Patrol log
• Protection log
• Tag log
• Tag management log
• Translation notifications log
• Translation review log
• User merge log
• User rename log
• User rights log

Exceptions: do not allow 'thanks' for these log types:

• Thanks Log - because recursive/confusing/creates obligations of reciprocity
• User creation log - because it would just confuse the newcomers. they already get an auto-welcome notification at home-wiki
• Move log - creates a revision, so you can already thank for this
• Page create log - doesn't exist yet, but will (T12331). Creates a revision.
• Upload log - Creates a revision
• Need discussion:
• Block log
• Global block log
• Global IP block log