https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21377

--- Comment #2 from Jack Phoenix <[email protected]> 2011-09-07 
17:43:26 UTC ---
Extension page on MediaWiki.org:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SiteWideMessages

Last year we at ShoutWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ShoutWiki) looked into
SiteWideMessages and I ended up hacking a version which works for our setup
(which, obviously, is a bit different than Wikimedia's or Wikia's). Some notes:
*the original extension is not 1:1 compatible with the trunk (or any branched
version, for that matter) of MediaWiki; there are a few custom functions and
some core patches that are needed
**two core patches are still needed, to includes/diff/DifferenceInterface.php
and to includes/User.php; both of these patches are *not* straightforward
***User.php patch changes the way of how the UserRetrieveNewTalks hook works
and the original Wikia code uses a Wikia-specific global ($wgCityId) identifier
of the current wiki in the User.php patch
***DifferenceInterface.php patch adds a hook called GetUserMessagesDiffCurrent
in *three* different places of the code and its logic is generally speaking a
bit scary
*even after I rewrote some database queries, the extension still uses plenty of
subqueries and some normal queries that currently cannot be done with
MediaWiki's database abstraction layer
*there's some bad i18n, mainly related to the building of expiration dates
*I had to hardcode ShoutWiki's domain in SiteWideMessages::userNewTalks (the
function which is hooked into the UserRetrieveNewTalks hook)
**there's plenty of ShoutWiki-specific code in my version, and obviously that
should be generalized, but ironically MediaWiki doesn't deal too well with wiki
farm setups by default
***for ShoutWiki's setup, we could safely assume that if there is "wiki" in the
database's name, it's a MediaWiki database; the same may or may not be true for
Wikimedia

Now, even if (when? :) we fix those issues, there's still a few things to take
into account:
1) SiteWideMessages generally are /annoying/ -- you get the "You have new
messages" bar for each SiteWideMessage until you dismiss them. Of course, the
new preferences proposed in the original bug report could address this.
2) ***SiteWideMessages is an extension meant for WIKI FARMS, not for individual
wikis***. It's much like the CentralNotice extension
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CentralNotice>, which is enabled on
Wikimedia sites. If SiteWideMessages would be enabled on Wikimedia, there'd
most likely be a very small group of users who were allowed to use it, either
Wikimedia staff, stewards or an entirely new group who would have the
'sitewidemessages' user right.

If someone is interested in the ShoutWiki version of SiteWideMessages, I can
commit it to the official MediaWiki Subversion repository at
http://svn.wikimedia.org/.

In the light of the above, I'm suggesting either LATER or WONTFIX.

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