Thomas Wang offered to transfer the enwp.org domain to the WMF in February. Did anyone ever follow up on that?
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/50984
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/50988
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In general I strongly recommend against this sort of ad-hoc URL shortener; they have a bad history of being unreliable at worst and are an extra administrative burden and annoyance for users at best.
I don't disagree in general, but enwp.org is widely used. Unless that's going to change, we should ensure that it will continue to be available.
Lots of people proposed various uniform shortener schemes, but none has been implemented, as far as I know, and enwp.org is more convenient than any of them anyway.
This is RT 822.
There was a message to Thomas a little over 2 weeks ago. No response yet. But there was no other recent contact AFAIK so maybe the address we used is not current.
Also, there were a number of messages talking about a "shortening service" and I get the impression that people see that phrase and take it at face value without reading the whole ticket.
To reiterate from RT:
maintaining the status quo doesn't require maintaining a database of any kind nor any new services. it's just a simple 1 line RewriteRule regex in redirects.conf
I emailed Thomas just now outside of phabricator. I'll update this task with details as I get a reply. If I receive no reply within a week, I plan to reject this ticket. (If he replies back later, I'll simply re-open this.)
I emailed about this on the 30th, and no answer as of now. If I get one, I'll reopen this task. As of now, the owner (Thomas) has not responded.