The Blackout extension doesn't currently have its own phab project. I'm going to put it in the review queue and thus I'd like to ask for a new project to be created. I guess the name should be Mediawiki-extension-Blackout, standard policy, and a description like
Project for the Blackout extensions, which allows to prevent site access. See the [[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Blackout|homepage]] on mediawiki.org.
Many thanks.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Declined | None | T203228 Review and deploy Blackout extension | |||
| Declined | None | T203227 Create phabricator project for Extension:Blackout |
@Daimona: Do you co-maintain that extension?
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Blackout#Requests_by_developer states to "Add any wishes to the talk page" instead. Is that still correct?
I'd favor creating the project if there's maintenance planned on the extension and Phabricator is the preferred venue for reporting such issues. The second item is certainly happening so maybe having everything in one place instead of spread all over MediaWiki-extensions-Other can be a good idea. Thanks.
Blackout has been written by Wikimedia for the SOPA protest back in 2012 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA ). It was a one time sprint / effort that was not intended to be kept around. The extension really just added an overlay on all pages with a black background and a message.
It is quite unlikely to be ever used again. Moreover, after six years, lot of things have changed in MediaWiki and I am not sure it is worth the effort to adapt the extension for an hypothetical future usage :]
So I guess we can just archive it in CI/Gerrit etc. If one day we have a need for that it can always be restored, or most probably rewritten from scratch.
@hashar I didn't know any detail about who wrote the extension and how long was it planned to be kept around. However, please note that the version I posted for review is not what the extension used to be. It removes SOPA/PIPA-related skins, completely reworks the extension to make it customizable on-wiki, and it redirects to a given page instead of adding an overlay. In other words, the refactor turns it into a broader tool to be used for blackouts, and something meant to be kept around as well. Since the change is pretty big we may decide to move my version to a new extension, but I wonder whether it would really be useful, since the idea here is to restart the revieq queue.
Also, as I was saying in T203228#4547957, deploying this extension doesn't mean that it will be used. We don't know if there'll be another blackout and when, and we can't know how it'll be implemented. The goal of deploying the extension is to have a tool already in place, instead of starting a full review process (which can take a long time) in a situation where we could be really, really short on time.
I don't want to reopen the task without hearing other thoughts, but again please keep in mind that a new version of this extension is the one under review, and we may not have time to "rewrite it from scratch" the next time we'll need it.
@MarcoAurelio As I was saying above, I can (co-)maintain the extension, of course here on phab.
@Daimona sorry I completely missed you sent a patch that overhaul the extension ( https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/extensions/Blackout/+/444363/ ). So yeah I guess we want to keep maintaining it and it could use a phabricator project :]
Sorry for the trouble!
No problem :-) Unfortunately, creating all these tasks made me forget to report the same info everywhere, and I didn't specify the current status here.
Setting to stalled per discussion in T198890: Develop an easy way for wikis to create a blackout protest
@Liuxinyu970226: Note that the added maintainer Phab account is not verified and hence will not receive notifications from Wikimedia Phabricator.
I don't see active development in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/project:mediawiki/extensions/Blackout hence I propose declining this for the time being until T198890 is sorted out.