What is the expected benefit of making such a page sysops only?

In T150591#2790691, @Psychoslave wrote:

What is the expected benefit of making such a page sysops only?

Decisions about candidates can be positive or negative. If an automated algorithm added an user, who is good faith but inexperienced, to such a list, a negative decision can discourage an user from editing. But if the list will be hidden from non-sysops, the user will not know about negative decision.

MediaWiki doesn't have the ability to have private discussion pages like that, and likely isn't ever going to.

In T150591#2791303, @Krenair wrote:

MediaWiki doesn't have the ability to have private discussion pages like that, and likely isn't ever going to.

I speak not about discussion pages, but about restricted special pages like "Unwatched pages", "Deleted user contributions", etc. If such a page would exist, it would be just a read-only source of information for sysops, not a place where discussions and decisions are written.

Well, in that case we'd still be inventing a new feature and a new type of semi-private data. And it'd probably be pretty easy to build a tool to list users who would usually have been promoted but have not been.

In T150591#2791456, @Krenair wrote:

Well, in that case we'd still be inventing a new feature and a new type of semi-private data. And it'd probably be pretty easy to build a tool to list users who would usually have been promoted but have not been.

But such a list is an additional feature. The main request is to disable automatic promotion of user statuses.

$wgFlaggedRevsAutopromote = $wmfStandardAutoPromote;

for eowiki, but

$wmfStandardAutoPromote = $wgFlaggedRevsAutopromote; // flaggedrevs defaults
$wgFlaggedRevsAutopromote = false;

Maybe removing $wgFlaggedRevsAutopromote = $wmfStandardAutoPromote; for eowiki would solve this?

Change 322262 had a related patch set (by MarcoAurelio) published:
Remove FlaggedRevs autopromotion function at eowiki

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/322262

Hopefully @aaron could let us know if just removing $wgFlaggedRevsAutopromote = $wmfStandardAutoPromote; is enough or $wgFlaggedRevsAutopromote = false; is better. I changed my mind in the patch above and set it to false, but in PS2 I simply removed the variable.

Change 322262 merged by jenkins-bot:
Remove FlaggedRevs autopromotion function at eowiki

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/322262

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2016-11-29T19:15:25Z] <thcipriani@tin> Synchronized wmf-config/flaggedrevs.php: SWAT: [[gerrit:322262|Remove FlaggedRevs autopromotion function at eowiki]] T150591 (duration: 01m 37s)