Per , the wikimedia projects will switch unregistered contributors to https by default at some point. I'd like to know whether, upon registering or logging in, they would still have an option to switch back to HTTP (like I have in the first tab in preferences now).
I had raised a discussion here earlier, but it wasn't answered, so I figured that a folk with a MediaWiki instance could either answer or try to configure it in this way and check whether the preference would be gone or still remain.
Maybe you find a bugtracker entry, where this issue has already been discussed, however I don't know of one currently. Anyway, the setting in the preferences can already be hidden today (I am not saying that it will be hidden when everything is switched to HTTPS, but hiding it already is possible today). So should you configure your system in a way so that only HTTPS can be used, then you can get rid of this (then superfluous) option.
Ideally I'd get more details here. What is the configuration setting that is responsible for hiding or showing the "use HTTPS beyond the login form" preference?
FWIW, this is the wrong place to ask about Wikimedia config issues.
There's several ways of doing https for unregistered users. However I'm unaware of any plans for this in Wikimedia land, and the answer would depend on what specifically is being discussed. The blog post your citing is from a year ago, and doesn't seem to mention anything about unregistered users defaulting to https. There are however some wikis (mostly the private wikis, but also uzwiki per bugzilla:43466) where the canonical url is https (Which would normally mean both http and https work, but all email notices, etc use https, and that pages have a rel=canonical header telling google to prefer the https version of a page over the http one in search results).
