Hullo!
Last year we created a new feature called Flags, which has been live on your community for a while. As I'm sure some of you have noticed, we've been quiet about development on this front for a while. It's time for an update.
- A visit to Shady Pines retirement home
The brief summary is: we're planning to retire Flags in the near future. While the feature had some aspects we really liked, it simply hasn't been as beneficial as we hoped, especially now that Template Types has been launched sitewide.
After careful consideration over whether it makes sense to spend time to build out the feature further or to simplify article editing by removing it, we feel the latter makes the most sense.
However, we do not think this was wasted time - we learned a lot while creating this feature, and it's quite possible we'll use some of the code in other features in the future.
- How we'll retire it
In essence, we will run a bot that will switch Flags back into being a normal part of your article wikitext. We want to make this process as smooth as possible - ideally, viewers should see little difference, and editors will go back to editing notices just as they did in the past.
We will provide an update when we have more specific timing for this switchover, and feel free to continue using flags in the meantime.
I want to thank you all for helping try out this feature - we really appreciated all the feedback, suggestions and bug reports we received while it was available. If you have more thoughts and feedback about the feature, we'd still love to hear it - for example, was there some aspect that you really appreciated? Just let us know either below or via Special:Contact/feedback!