On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 22:23, Freek de Kruijf wrote:
In your case when a user only has an English page, but he/she has not mentioned an e-mail address there, you can't communicate. However a user has to register with a working e-mail address, so somewhere this information is available, but maybe privacy rules prevent this information from being used for other purposes than the registration.
It's a simple SQL select to find the email address of a registered user if you know the user name and you have access to the database ( select user_email from user where user_name="username"; ).
So... if it's really important to contact the former contributors, an admin could technically (and easily) dig out the email address they registered with and send off an email.... but like you said Freek, privacy rules may prevent this info from being used. In some Wikis I've worked on, admins have pulled email addresses and sent messages privately - ie NOT shared the address publicly - when it was important to contact a contributor, and this was considered within the limits of the privacy policies. Novell... I can't speak for them.
C.