On 25 July 2013 11:32, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
The preference didn't break anything. It had been active for months during the alpha testing. It was a conscious decision not to permit its continued use after the deployment on July 1, and the way that it was "disabled" was by hiding it.
This is correct, yes.
Those of you who know more about the system than do I pointed out that hiding the preference wasn't the appropriate step and if the VE team wanted to remove the option, it should be written out on their end. But the preference had been active for months before the July 1 deployment.
To be clear here, removing the preference we're talking about would disable the alpha opt-in on all wikis that aren't in the beta (all users by default) phase. That's 284 of the 293 Wikipedias right now (and would also remove the ability for us to deploy the opt-in alpha to Wiktionaries, Commons, Meta, *etc. *before we are ready to support them in beta); I think hiding rather than removing the preference was the only real choice here.
J.