Dear Toolforge admins,

I read that the permanent redirects from tools.wmflabs.org to *.toolforge.org (T234617) are going to be introduced this month (15th June). This is a problem for the openrefine-wikidata tool (T254169), which exposes an API where POST is used by clients. It is not possible to redirect POST requests, and therefore I anticipate that all queries made to the service via its old URL will fail. This is an API where it is normal to perform a POST request out of the blue, without any preliminary GET request.

The solution of course is that clients update the URL they query, but since the service is offered as a documented API (following public specifications), there is no list of such clients and no guarantee to update them all in time.

I therefore request your clemency in the migration (so, continuing to serve the service from tools.wmflabs.org), ideally of a few months if that is not too much to ask for. On my side, I will work to:

• work with the W3C Community Group to devise a good mechanism in the specifications to ensure clients follow the change, for instance by adding a preliminary GET request before any session of POST requests, and publish a new draft of the specifications accordingly;
• patch the historic client (OpenRefine) of this API to follow the agreed mechanism above.

Sorry for not bringing up this issue earlier, I did not realize that these POST requests would be an issue.
I suspect there might be other tools which expose POST-based APIs and which might suffer from the same issue.