As someone doing program management, I want a way to move tasks in batch each quarter without notifying lots of people, and which doesn't rely on another team or person not on the requesting team to execute.
Detail:
Some teams I work with change workboards every quarter. E.g. "Kanban 2019-20 Q4". They make these Milestones to facilitate ease-of-use on their backlogs. When the quarter turns over, the remaining tasks get moved from one quarterly board to another. On a normal Phab account, this triggers a lot of notifications for people subscribed to those tasks.
In the past, there was @Phabricator_maintenance for moving tasks silently, but per T216867, that account no longer functions properly. In a typical, non-time-sensitive scenario, the workaround has been to request a CLI bulk edit from RelEng. This workaround is also why fixing the account has not been a priority.
However, my particular use-case needs to have someone familiar with the work present, in order to quickly restore tasks to the right columns on the new board. This is especially true when using Milestones, as the board are mutually exclusive (with typical tags, the request can be processed and then the restoration can happen later, by using the old board for reference and/or as a stopgap). If there is a lag between the execution of the request and this restoration, a team's process is disrupted.
(Ideally, Phabricator would simply recognize columns on the new board, and move the tasks automagically, but this functionality doesn't exist).
If I could run the command myself via SSH, I could effectively execute my own silent batch edits. As currently CLI access is defined by phabricator-admin in puppet's data.yaml, this would likely need to be a separate new group just for permissions to run the srv/phab/phabricator/bin/bulk make-silent --id * command.