Hello all,

This change might impact people who run tools based on the patrolling status of edits. This could also be relevant for admins. Feel free to share with your local communities.

Currently, MediaWiki is storing the information about if an edit has been patrolled or autopatrolled in the logging table. This table is getting very very big, causing significant infrastructure issues.

Therefore, we plan to make the following changes:

• Stop adding new entries for autopatrolling to the logging table
• Remove the old entries for autopatrolling from this table
• Since the distinction between autopatrol and manual patrol was introduced in April of 2016, We need to remove every patrol action (manual or not) before that date.
• Include information about autopatrolled in the recentchanges table. The fields rc_patrolled is current 0 for unpatrolled edits, and 1 for patrolled edits. In the future, it will be 0 for unpatrolled, 1 for manually patrolled, and 2 for autopatrolled edits.

This means that the information about if an edit is autopatrolled, will be accessible only in the Recent Changes table, for 30 days. For now, manual patrolling actions will continue to be recorded in the logging table as before, and will remain visible on Special:Log. More details can be found in the technical RFC document, see phab:T184485.

We plan to deploy these changes on April 4th. The script removing patrol actions in the database may take several weeks to run.

If you’re maintaining a tool using logging.log_action = "autopatrolled", please consider changing your code to use recentchanges.rc_patrolled = 2. If this is going to cause large issues for an important tool, please let us know.