(adding legacy skin 'tracking' tags for visibility; + Timeless which doesn't seem to have a 'tracking' tag)

Thanks for the patch @A_smart_kitten !

@Niharika - Do we have any data on how often Temp accounts are using specific skins? My assumption is that this is a rare edge case, but it also seems like someone from PSI or Growth could take a look at the submitted POC patch to see if the fix is fairly simple.

In T409777#11361638, @KStoller-WMF wrote:

@Niharika - Do we have any data on how often Temp accounts are using specific skins?

[I'm not @Niharika but] As far as I understand, temporary accounts don't have the option of using a non-default skin (short of something like adding a useskin= parameter to each request they send to MediaWiki); due to the fact that they can't set their own user preferences (T330815: Disallow preference setting by temporary users). So basically (if I understand correctly), this would primarily affect sites whose default skin is not Minerva or Vector 2022 (or a similarly engineered skin).

As far as Wikimedia wikis go, of the three wikis currently listed in the 'legacy Vector' dblist, I assume this would only have the potential to affect the Russian Wikipedia (due to the fact that the other two are fishbowl wikis). As far as I can see, this would be the case if ruwiki's default skin is still Vector 2010 (xref T375046) at the time of its temporary account deployment.

For non-Wikimedia wikis, I'm not sure what the best source of default-skin data might be. WikiApiary comes to mind, but (as far as I know) that site hasn't been working for a few years. Looking at an archived WikiApiary page from June 2022, though: assuming that the data is correct (and that I'm interpreting it correctly!), the default skin for the majority of wikis that WikiApiary was aware of appears to have been 'Vector', with a sizeable minority of wikis using a different default skin. Unfortunately, while that might give us some idea as to the proportion of wikis that don't use Vector as their default skin, it doesn't help in understanding how many of the sites that were using Vector 2010 would switch their default skin to Vector 2022 if/when that became available to them.

(@Niharika apologies for jumping in here, and please correct me if anything I've said is wrong!)

@A_smart_kitten no worries! I agree with your assessment. The impact would only be for Russian WP as things stand currently. My understanding is that the Web team are actively talking about deploying Vector 22 with the communities. It is unclear when that might happen in practice though.
In the meantime, we are talking about possibilities for deploying temporary accounts with legacy Vector on ruwiki: T411207. This work will not involve supporting notifications since that is a substantially larger amount of work (per @Jdlrobson). We are optimistic that Vector 22 will be deployed on ruwiki within the next few months, so hopefully this will be a non-issue after some time.

This is because temporary accounts do not have a username displayed

But we should display them on all skins, with the notice about what it is, like in vector-2022.

So, it looks like this might have happened (at least, for some skins), but outside the context of this task :p
(maybe as a side-effect of T409774: Deprecate legacy "personal" and "namespaces" menu from SkinTemplate?)

E.g. -- as a result of 1217256: Legacy Vector should use modern menu keys (fcf459310e281d), the top toolbar for temp-accounts using V2010 currently looks like:

I haven't personally git bisected any other skins for lack of spoons; but from looking at the other patches attached to T409774, it seems like a similar change may have also been made to (at least) Modern, CologneBlue, MonoBook, & Timeless. Doing a brief bit of testing on a blank Patch Demo, it seems like (at least) those skins may now also show notification icons for temporary accounts.

I'll leave it to others to decide whether this means that this task should now be closed, or if it should remain open for e.g. any other skins that haven't had a patch applied to them. (cc @Jdlrobson-WMF)

In T409777#11708607, @Jdlrobson-WMF wrote:

[…] but the orange bar of death doesn't [work]

FWIW the orange 'new messages' bar does actually work for me on eg. V2010, testing on a blank Patch demo: