To allow global autoblocks while protecting the privacy of logged in users, the gbw_address column needs to be hidden from the global_block_whitelist table when the block is a global autoblock. However, this is not possible to achieve as the record whether a global block is an autoblock is stored on the globalblocks table database, which is always different to the global_block_whitelist table databases. Therefore, it is not possible to set up a custom view to hide the column on the wiki replicas (as described in T374855).

To solve this issue, we can remove the gbw_address and gbw_target_central_id columns as unused. This is because most code already does the local status lookup using the gbw_id value. Code which does not do this can be updated to lookup by ID by finding the relevant block globalblocks table first.