Are the breakages on the site really that massive? We've been getting little to no reports of breakages.
From what I understand, most of these breakages are in tools and scripts developed and operated by volunteer developers, not WMF developers. The big one is Huggle, which on enwp is used by a large majority of admins and recent changes patrollers. There are additional notes on the enwp village pump (technical) that appear to be related, although I do not have the expertise to assess this. I have been told that there are parallel issues on some of the other large projects, although I don't have direct knowledge.
Petr mentioned huggle on list. I just checked the enwiki village pump and don't see a single complaint. In fact, I see comments in the IPv6 section saying things like "we've been anticipating this for years".
If you are asking for us to notify the community earlier, I accept that. We did this last minute because we wanted to participate on IPv6 day, and we had a few free days to do so right before it. I apologize that it's poorly affecting your workflow, but your level of anger is unwarranted. We've been pretty good about announcing things in general. All user-facing HTTPS changes were announced weeks before they were made, for instance. Remember, that this is the ops group you're complaining about, and not engineering as a whole, and we rarely make user-facing changes.
Yes, the team has been good at giving advance heads-ups, even for things that are relatively low impact, and it has been a very positive experience. Thus this unexpectedly short notice is more jarring.
Again the actual implementation date wasn't announced, but it's been known for years that we'd enable IPv6.
I think one opportunity that was not considered was taking it live on IPv6 Day as a "trial" and then pulling it back to allow everyone else to fix what didn't work during the trial day. Yes, it is important to test things; no, it's not necessary to make a permanent change without assessing the results of the test.
That makes no sense. How are people going fix things when they have no place to test the fixes? Unless massive portions of the site are broken, or there's rampant vandalism that can't be fixed, it's silly to disable IPv6.
If you are complaining about things being broken, we need to know exactly what they are, or we can't help. Tell us whats broken here, or even better, add some bugs.
As I've noted, almost everything I'm aware of that is genuinely not functioning correctly is stuff that is written by and maintained by volunteer developers, not the WMF, so bugzillas aren't going to help here. For non-WMF related reasons, I use very few scripts, gadgets or tools so I don't have the experience to tell you which volunteer-produced tools are or are not functioning well.
From what I'm seeing, there's not many complaints, and not much that's
actually broken. When things are really broken, we tend to hear about it from a number of people.
I don't want to sound dismissive, but other than a lack of communication about the date of deployment, I'm not seeing the problem here.
- Ryan