Trust and Safety Product/Temporary Accounts/For developers/2024-04 CTA
(This message is about Wikimedia-specific changes. Nothing mentioned here is mandatory for the third-party MediaWiki users.)
Hello everyone,
We are reaching out on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Trust and Safety Product team, working on the Temporary Accounts project (formerly, IP Masking). Currently, we are making preparations for deployment on testwiki.
We want to minimize the impact of temporary accounts on the ecosystem of tools and features. Before deployment, we'll ask for stewards' confirmation that critical workflows are not affected. Now, we would like to ask you to check the impact on code you maintain. There may be breaking changes!
We do not have a firm deadline for deployment yet. We will let you know as soon as we do. But because it will happen soon, we would like to ask you to consider updating your tool's code over the next weeks, if the tool works on any/all production cluster wiki. If it only works on selected wikis and testwiki is not one of them, you will have more time to update it. If you think it will take longer than that to update your code, please let us know on our talk page.
For a full explanation of the technical change, please read our documentation. In particular, the section on how your code might need to be updated.
Some examples of ways code might be affected (not exhaustive):
- A feature looks for the IP address in the user name (it will no longer be found).
- A feature that relies on looking at the userâs ID to identify if the user is registered or unregistered. Temporary accounts will not have a user_id of 0.
- A feature works differently for unregistered vs registered users.
We may have discovered your issue already and filed a Phabricator task using the #temporary-accounts tag. You may wish to file a subtask of T337012. We hope that this task will help us all as the technical community coordinate on tools requiring updates.
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about the project, take a look at our project page and reach out to us on the talk page.
Thank you!