In T300265#8666980, @tstarling wrote:

I think I can adapt SecurePoll's sendMail.php for this purpose.

Pardon my ignorance - will this send out emails to impacted users? If yes, what about users who do not have a registered email address?

In T300265#8684568, @Niharika wrote:

Pardon my ignorance - will this send out emails to impacted users?

Yes.

If yes, what about users who do not have a registered email address?

Maybe we can put a renameuser log snippet on the login page, when login fails.

Maybe we can put a renameuser log snippet on the login page, when login fails.

This is complicated for the reasons that T134100 is complicated. The special page doesn't even have a concept of usernames, that is all in the authentication providers. LocalPasswordPrimaryAuthenticationProvider and CentralAuthPrimaryAuthenticationProvider both know about user existence and could theoretically check their respective rename logs if they are configured as authoritative. But AuthenticationResponse only allows for a single error message. It would have to be extended to provide extra information.

Change 900522 had a related patch set uploaded (by Tim Starling; author: Tim Starling):

[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMaintenance@master] A script to create SecurePoll mailing list for users with names matching a prefix

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/900522

I procrastinated and went back and forth on this a lot. It would be nice to dive into it and make a unified mass mailing system for WMF and resolve a bunch of tasks. In the end I decided to keep it absolutely minimal. sendMail.php doesn't really need adapting at all, we can just run it as it is. I just wrote a little script to make an input file for it.

I'm not sure I follow. How would we inform users about this impending change if they have not provided us with an email address? Can we go the MassMessage route? I am especially concerned about any accounts that have been active in the last year or so. I would also like to give them heads up in advance (at least 1 month) that this change is happening and tell them what their new username will be. If we can create a list of the users who were active in the last year and have to be renamed, I can work with CRS to inform them using MassMessage.

How are you considering migrating these users? Will they have a different prefix instead of the asterisk?

OK, we can do a MassMessage nowish. Maybe an email as well, later on?

I made a MassMessage list at meta:MassMessage/Lists/Active users whose name starts with asterisk with all users whose name starts with asterisk that have made an edit in the last year. Only 82 users, which is surprisingly few, but a simple query against enwiki confirms that it's roughly correct. Of 607 asterisk users in enwiki, only 31 were active in the last year.

The number of global asterisk users with a confirmed email address is 1265.

How are you considering migrating these users? Will they have a different prefix instead of the asterisk?

Yes, I assume so. I'm open to suggestions as to the new prefix. The script I wrote for T307064 is pretty flexible.

@tstarling thanks. Let's hold off on this for a moment. We are reconsidering the asterisk in light of T14974: The newline added to a template, magic word, variable, or parser function that returns line-start wikicode formatting (*#:; {|) causes unexpected parsing.

Change 900522 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMaintenance@master] A script to create SecurePoll or MassMessage list for users with names matching a prefix

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/900522