[[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser | CheckUser ]] (#mediawiki-extensions-CheckUser · rECHU) is probably one of the oldest extensions still working in Wikimedia Projects.
Designed c. 2005, the extension is one othe critical that helps to deal with problematic cases of abuse such as sock puppetry, vandalism and spam ([[ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/History_of_user_rights#CheckUser | some history here ]]). As time goes by, the needs of the projects increased, and as we can see in the [[ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/203/ | CheckUser workboard ]], the bugs accumulate without being resolved, primary because its code, albeit old, seems also hard to read and work upon it for developers (refer to {T132892} and it's related tasks, as well as the workboard I've linked above).
The lack of an active mantainer of the Extension lowers the development in this area (ie: bug resolution, testing and extension development //ex// Phabricator). To resolve this issues, I think we need to think about overhauling the CheckUser extension. That overhaul should also be an oportunity to make the extension work with all the new features and the new code MediaWiki has at its current state. And we can also take this oportunity to gather opinions from CheckUsers on which new functions the new CheckUser extension should have, etc.
I think that we can start this big task by making an UI revamp, and later explore if new features could be added to the extension as well. If someone or various people could also volunteer to be active mantainers to the extension that'd be also fantastic.
I'd like to thank all of those who have created and worked in the extension so far.
Sorry if the format is wrong or I missed something. It's the first RFC I fill here. Let me know if there's something that needs fixing and I'll try to do that.
Best regards.
//Edit:// since rewritting from scratch is a bad option according to experienced developers below, modified some parts of the intro as well.