Silke Meyer wrote:
The domain tools.wikimedia.de, aliasing toolserver.org, has been deprecated for a very long time. It is legacy from the past and we kept it for your convenience so you wouldn't have to modify any tool.
With the toolserver redirects to Tool Labs things are getting complicated enough without this old stuff. If you have very old tools and you are still using tools.wikimedia.de, please get rid of that domain! After the toolserver's shutdown, this redirect will on longer work.
Thanks for your understanding!
I don't really understand. Wikimedia Deutschland is clearly going to continue owning and operating wikimedia.de. The cost of the redirects is likely dramatically outweighed by the benefit to not breaking so many links.
For what it's worth:
MariaDB [enwiki_p]> select count(*) from externallinks where el_index like 'http://de.wikimedia.tools./%'; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 87059 | +----------+ 1 row in set (1.04 sec)
Another 14,674 results on dewiki_p. We're probably talking about half a million links on the Web... I think it's worth a few additional lines of Web server configuration to keep these links functional, if possible.
I suppose it could be argued that having a domain under *.wikimedia.de could be dangerous, but... eh. This doesn't seem to be what's being said in this e-mail, in any case.
MZMcBride