Help talk:E-mail

email functionality

(imported from WikiIndex_talk:Community_portal#email_functionality)

Regarding the 8+ years, what about the email functionality? Did You get it to work? If any functionality is more community relevant than that, which would it be? Manorainjan (talk) 14:03, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

RecentChanges is the most important community tool for wiki, when the community grows very large, related changes off of category pages becomes useful. ~~ MarkDilley

I see what You mean. It is on WikiIndex that I learned to watch the RC closely. But I do not see it as more important than email. Practically it is, if the email does not work. But I do not intend to become a RC-junkie. I regard RC as something mainly for sysops, for those who have to have a watch over others. RC is what You get with the installation, it's most basic functionality. The other community relevant functionalities needs to be build and cared for, like this page. When RC becomes the place where everything seams to happen, it is, because nobody cared to build a better place. RC is a primitive, a fall back. In order to build a good quality of community one needs to design complex higher functions. When people poke their noses in my sandbox because they are watching my every little step on RC I got to think: "don't they have better things to do?" I once asked Sean if sandbox-edits can be excluded from RC and he denied that. So, if technically this is not possible than it should be excluded by means of policy in order to create more privacy.

And there comes email in play: Privacy! You can not have community without privacy. You don't want every bit of talk with another member of Your community to be overheared by all and everybody. This causes tensions of many kinds. So one better not rivals one community feature with another. The more community supporting features one has, the better for the community and its complexity. Manorainjan (talk) 10:34, 23 September 2014 (UTC)