Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Anti-harassment/Notifications for user page edits

Notifications for user page edits

  • Problem: If your user page is modified by a malicious user, you may not notice if your watchlist is overflowed. Unlike a normal article, it is very unlikely that another user will revert or warn about the malicious changes for you. Unlike article vandalism, user page vandalism can affect the unwitting users standing in the community.
  • Proposed solution: Generate notifications for user page modifications by other users, just like user talk notifications work now. Another solution would be to protect user pages from modification, but some edits may be friendly and even useful.
  • Who would benefit: Users whose user page has been vandalized.
  • More comments: It could be made configurable per user.
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T3876
  • Proposer: Error (talk) 10:49, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Related to phab:T176351 (for the protection part). Note, some projects use abusefilter to add some protections to base userpages already as well. — xaosflux Talk 11:37, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, however blocked users, new users should have the userpage editable as, I think to mark sockpuppets and banned users. Meta already has this, but I have problems when marking problematic userpages for deletion. Thingofme (talk) 10:48, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a nice wish which should be very easy to deploy and should ease our fight against harassment. A single notification when someone, whoever, modify your user page seems fairly reasonable. Xavier Dengra (MESSAGES) 00:01, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not a fan of blocking such edits entirely (many may be in good-faith, even if by IPs, e.g. in user space TODO or cleanup lists) but getting a notification should definitely be the default. I would add that page creations in another user's user space should also generate a notification for that user. Fytcha (talk) 18:48, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • A notification would be nice, certainly. I'm not sure I'd want it to be the orange bar of doom, though. A few times in the past, I've done something like fixing a typo on someone else's userpage, and I might be less likely to do that if I knew it'd give them a big dramatic alert. {{u|Sdkb}}talk 18:50, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Or: redo the watchlist so that pages can be categorized, sorted, or assigned levels of importance. This is an important tool for editors - why should so many find it unusable? François Robere (talk) 12:01, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • This proposal inspire me an idea for the watchlist, as per the idea above, a kind of levelled watchlist, with different level of notifications. E.g. it would be useful in the case of overflowed watchlists to chose some pages of which we want a more visible notification within the watchlist when these have been modified. By showing the corresponding notifications in the current watchlist with an additional section "pages to monitor first", or "important pages" or "priority pages", ect... Christian Ferrer (talk) 12:03, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting