On Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:39:13 -0700 Rolando Abarca <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2026 at 11:17 AM Mario Domenech Goulart > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Can you elaborate on what you consider a downgrade of quality? > > From your original email: > * Gitweb -> "much more limited interface" > * Trac -> disabled > * The history of pages in our wiki -> disabled > * The bug tracker -> replaced widely supported tool with new tool that no one > else uses Thanks for clarifying. My question was not intended to be confrontative, but to understand what you mean by quality, as its meaning can be vague without a context. Generally speaking, the meaning of quality depends on what you value. We've agreed that forcing users to enable JavaScript on their browsers to be able to access our resources is not in line with what we value. The resources we provide are still available, although through different interfaces, which are less likely to be abused by crawlers. We hope that our users will be ok with the existing interfaces. If that turns out not to be the case, we can consider improvements based on feedback, but we must take into account whether we can afford to implement and maintain them. On the technical aspect of things, I personally value availability and determinism. The simplifications were made as an attempt to make resources as available as possible, as many times they became unavailable because our server could not cope with the load imposed by crawlers. The exclusion of JavaScript was a decision targeting determinism. As a user, I don't want to be randomly questioned whether I am human or not, and have access to resources denied based on that assessment, which depends on the requirement of a JavaScript interpreter embedded into the HTTP client I use. If you think about that, you might realize that in that scenario the software required for you to prove that you are human is probably larger and more complex than the software you use to request resources via HTTP (I'm not talking about web browsers, necessarily). > To me that would be requiring users to have JavaScript enabled on > their browsers and being tracked by foreign companies to be able to > access our resources. > > I might be an outsider here, but did you ask your users whether or not they > have javascript enabled by default? I haven't run a poll or anything scientific. I discussed with the other maintainers and also know, based on interactions in IRC, that many users wouldn't like the requirement on JavaScript. > We don't want to depend on Cloudfare to be able to provide our services. > > That's a very fair point. There might be other options though. Sure. As I mentioned, we can consider other approaches as long as they are viable to us. All the best. Mario -- https://parenteses.org/mario
