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Proton: Notification to Community
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Description

What is the problem/what do you want to achieve?

As part of RESTbase deprecation, we need to deprecate (or migrate) the underused PDF generating service, Proton, because there are other, more used ways to create PDFs and no one currently maintains this service. It is a blocker for the larger RESTbase deprecation work. There are no plans to maintain the service based on low percentage usage. We have not yet been able to identify the bot owner who is, by far, the largest user of the service. The service is available across all Wikimedia projects and languages.

How can we help you?

Help designing the best community communication path forward.
The options I currently see are:
a) announce on wikitech-l that we are deprecating the service with ~3 months notice.
b) conduct community outreach to specific parts of the potentially affected communities to help them create workarounds or discover reasons this service should not deprecate.

What does success look like?

Success is when we have a mutually agreed to sustainable path forward for both RESTbase deprecation work to advance and the communities' PDF generation needs are met.

What is your deadline?

Decision on path forward: End of March 2023
Completion of RESTbase deprecation: June 2023

Current Proton usage by wiki

Screenshot 2023-02-10 at 18.06.49.png (1×2 px, 237 KB)

Event Timeline

Elitre renamed this task from Proton: Community Consultation to Proton: Notification to Community .Feb 10 2023, 7:21 PM

Adam, Virginia and I met. At the end of our meeting we looked into the fact that Proton is just one of many things we'd want to decommission.
At this point, it's worth for them to explore if they can come up with an entire list of things we want to shut down, with deadlines. Once they have that list, rather than focusing on one item at the time, I will propose an overall plan.

@Elitre
We have one caller with a generic user-agent making the majority of all calls. In order to learn more about who they are, since they do not follow our user-agent policy and we can not reach them, we will block their calls with a helpful and friendly message.

Example:
400 Error
missing informative User-Agent string with contact information as documented in User-Agent policy.

Any concerns about this approach?

Nice to have:
Including a way to contact us directly.
Do we have a generic email address or other method for contacting that we can include?

I'll answer in our planning doc, thanks.

Elitre raised the priority of this task from Medium to High.

We have one caller with a generic user-agent making the majority of all calls. In order to learn more about who they are, since they do not follow our user-agent policy and we can not reach them, we will block their calls with a helpful and friendly message.

@VirginiaPoundstone: Is that T332061, or do you refer to another case?

It should be that one.
FWIW we keep working on this, and the next step is discussing with the PO, who is Olga.

Elitre lowered the priority of this task from High to Medium.May 22 2023, 10:58 AM

We're in a bit of an empasse currently as we're trying to maybe couple this to other pieces that are also candidates for sunsetting, but may ultimately decide not to do it if it delays us too much.