Upgrade Extension:Newsletter in favor of bot delivery and mass pings (Community Wishlist/W481)
Under review
Description
Extension:Newsletter provides tools for newsletter management, including user rights and subscriptions. When a new issue is published, a notification is sent to all subscribers with a link to the issue (which can be a new page or just a new section). This overlaps with at least two means of notifying many users:
- User:MediaWiki message delivery (Extension:MassMessage) – robot delivery of newsletters globally to user talk pages, village pumps, project boards, etc.
- Mass "ping", mass notification a.k.a. ping project – notifying many users at once by linking to their usernames, possibly using templates.
These methods come with disadvantages:
- "To err is human." Once you have the robot deliver messages, you cannot simply stop it. If you made a mistake, it will immediately affect hundreds of talk pages. Cleaning up the mess is painful given that the delivery works cross-wiki.
- Talk pages get rapidly bloated, especially in case of weekly newsletters or many subscriptions, becoming mirrors of the newsletter archive. Contacting users on their talk page that is not regularly archived may even become impossible (due to page size limit).
- Due to technical limitations, talk page notifications of newsletters delivered by the robot lack useful information (phab:T59234, phab:T71954, phab:T218724).
- Pings are limited to maximum of 50. This limit is supposed to prevent abuse. Thus, {{Ping project}} sends no notifications for wikiprojects with many participants, penalizing them just for their growth.
- Sending pings is generally unreliable. Templates turning lists of users into pings can break formatting of talk pages.
- Static wikitext-based lists of subscribers do not account for user renames or account vanishing (example).
- Broadcasters cannot subscribe to hear from folks if they reply to a local delivery.
This wish proposes assessment of features that Extension:Newsletter lacks, implementing these features, deploying the extension to all Wikimedia wikis (currently, it is installed only on mediawiki.org) and gradually migrating global newsletter delivery to it.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned
Type of wish
System change
Tags
Affected users
active wikimedians
Phabricator tasks
Other details
- Created: 09:40, 9 December 2025
- Last updated: 09:59, 2 March 2026
- Author: Matěj Suchánek (talk)
Voting
This wish currently has 4 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.
Supporters of this wish
Support Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:40, 9 December 2025
Support Paloi Sciurala (talk) 13:48, 21 January 2026
Support Sohom Datta (talk) 16:43, 20 March 2026