Talk:Requests for comment/CentralNotice backend improvements

Great to see some thinking about this important part of our infrastructure, thanks Tim! Why CNBanner instead of just Banner? Namespaces show up in a lot of places so that seems unnecessarily implementation-focused.--Erik Moeller (WMF) (talk) 07:35, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Just because it exists already. I guess if we extend it to other wikis then that will be a good time to rethink the name. -- Tim Starling (talk)

Suspiciously missing
Some points are surprisingly not touched at all: Taken from mwalker's m:Help:CentralNotice/Translations, which is still relevant. --Nemo 12:18, 15 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Extension:Translate (not mentioned once) and interaction with it,
 * 1495,
 * Language converter.

Community concerns
Thank you Tim for this wonderfully thorough, independent review! I'm relieved to see a public discussion beginning, the poor Fundraising crew have been moaning into our cupboards for too long now ;)

Complete agreement on your points so far, one more concern to make explicit is that high-impact changes to things like how banner JS can be edited must be negotiated with the community. For convenience, we have a centralnotice-admins@lists.wikimedia.org mailing list, I believe all centralnotice-admin users are subscribed.

However... that still might not include all the involved parties: I recently learned that metawiki site admins can edit banner content through a side door, without specific CN privileges. I don't know yet how often that happens.

While we're rapidly expanding scope, it would be worth mentioning the page load hit, even when no banner is displayed. Some improvements include, 1) We could back down a bit from our aggressive approach to delivering impressions on the first pageview of a session. 2) If we reduce the complexity of rules for targeting banners to viewers, lots of other efficiencies become achievable, such as eliminating the DNS lookup to metawiki, and eventually edge side inclusion.

Adamw (talk) 07:04, 19 September 2014 (UTC)


 * On your question: most banners are managed by Meta-Wiki sysops and requests handled on m:WM:RFH. CentralNotice/Usage guidelines was written by a Meta-Wiki sysop, too.
 * As long as this RfC is titled "CentralNotice backend improvements", I'd personally expect it not to change anything user-visible. As you mention, plenty of work is possible: Requests for comment/CentralNotice Caching Overhaul - Frontend Proxy is looking for a main author/point of contact, is it the best resource available on that side of things? --Nemo 07:19, 19 September 2014 (UTC)