I might be the source of most of the misinformation here :-)

On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 3:48 PM, bawolff <[email protected]> wrote:

> > A. 'Enabled' user preference
> > Provide a preference checkbox with Media Viewer enabled by default
> (e.g.: 'Show images in Media Viewer'). To disable MV, users can uncheck
> this preference.
> > * Pros: preferable from a UX point of view, indicates this is our
> recommended option, more user-friendy than JS gadget option below
> > * Cons: this approach has caused problems before[..]
>
> Really? What problems?
>
I vaguely remembered some problem the VE(?) team had with changing a
preference from unchecked-by-default to checked-by-default. (It had to do
with having to run a database query to flip that preference for all users,
I think.) Probably not applicable here.

> B. 'Disable' user preference
> > Provide a preference checkbox where Media Viewer can be disabled (e.g.:
> 'Disable Media Viewer'). To re-enable MV, users can uncheck that preference.
> > * Pros: addresses user concerns about pre-selection, more user-friendy
> than JS gadget option below
> > * Cons: unclear what Media Viewer is, confusing because you have to
> uncheck the preference to re-enable Media Viewer, adds to preference bloat
> issue
>
> My understanding is that negations are harder to understand at a glance.
> Check pref to not do X is more confusing than check pref to do X no matter
> what the default state is.
>

Agreed; the text you are quoting says pretty much the same. (OTOH such a
checkbox would probably communicate more clearly that enabling MediaViewer
is the "normal" state; people usually expect checkboxes to default to
unchecked.)

> C. Javascript gadget or script
>
> > Provide a site-wide gadget (or personal JS script) that would let users
> disable Media Viewer.
> > * Pros: no preference bloat, no cache fragmentation, can simply ride on
> #263 and provide example JS code.
> > * Cons: not user-friendly (the gadget has to be installed manually), the
> bootstrap script would still get loaded.
>
> (Parser) Cache fragmentation should not be an issue either way. This sort
> of pref should not need to vary the parser cache. (If it was implemented in
> that way, i would predict strong objections in gerrit. We have only a few
> cache varying prefs, and my understanding is we dont want to add any more
> without a very very good reason).
>

I thought this would not fragment the HTTP cache because the same set of JS
modules would be loaded initially for everyone; but there is no HTML
caching for logged-in users, so this is a non-issue.

At any rate, I think this could be complementary to one of the other two
options; it is less user-friendly but much more flexible, so it would be
possible to say (in a gadget, or site-wide JS) that MediaViewer should not
load on a certain page, in a certain namespace etc.
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