Quick update from our last conversation:

It seems that an is_temp column was considered but rejected by Data Persistence as something that would cause too much trouble. We decided to investigate that a bit, to understand exactly what would be involved, because the tech debt we have to incur by not adding the column is also significant. So we're currently trying to schedule a conversation with Data Persistence.

Related conversation: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T332420

The general plan, currently being reviewed by Product-Analytics, is as follows:

• Change pipelines as far upstream as possible to make temporary users look pretty much like anonymous users
  • So anywhere we have user_is_anonymous or similar, this should be true for old anon users and new temporary users
  • However, since new temporary users will have a real user_id, downstream consumers will still need to verify their logic does not rely on something like user_id == 0 to mean "anonymous"
• Track new data about temporary users and check our assumption that it does not affect or blur top line metrics too much
• After some analysis, decide whether to make this decision permanent or add new fields (eg. user_is_temporary) to help create more granular metrics that treat anonymous and temporary separately

We are moving this task to done, since it was an initial investigation. The next steps are:

• Continue conversation about this plan and validate that it's sound by looking at affected code
• Plan and estimate the work that we'll need to do in Data-Engineering