Grants:Project/Rapid/GeneralNotability/Bullseye

Briefly explain what are you trying to accomplish with this project, or what do you expect will change as a result of this grant. Example goals include, "recruit new editors", "add high quality content", or "train existing editors on a specific skill".

This grant will fund the purchase of licenses for the Bullseye tool, a webapp intended to significantly simplify the jobs of CheckUsers, Stewards, and users who need access to detailed information on IP addresses beyond that available in Mediawiki (or in the proposed IP Info feature). I have already invested personal time in the development of this tool, and it is currently operational on Toolforge, but it currently relies on free trials of external API feeds for some of the data that is especially useful to checkusers and administrators. By purchasing licenses to these feeds, Bullseye will be able to support more users and more lookups per month. Also, due to the API query limits, some features are restricted to administrators or to checkusers/stewards; by purchasing keys I can open these features to more editors.

Project Plan

Activities

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. What will you and other organizers spend your time doing?

This funding request is specifically to purchase one year of API licenses from external vendors as a trial (with the intention of re-applying at the end of the period for continued funding). During this time, I will continue to develop and support Bullseye, but I emphasize that none of this money is going to pay for my time; it is all going to license purchases.

How will you let others in your community know about your project (please provide links to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions)? Why are you targeting a specific audience?

Bullseye has previously been announced within the checkuser community on their private mailing list (my thanks to Martin Urbanec for making that announcement), but I will post notifications at other fora where interested users might be, such as the English Wikipedia's Village Pump (Technical) and WikiProject on Open Proxies. I also welcome editors making announcements on their home wikis. It is not so much that I am targeting a particular audience, it's that this is the audience who will get the most use out of this tool; I wrote it for my own needs, and have found that checkusers and the like have found the tool very useful.

What will you have done at the end of your project? How will you follow-up with people that are involved with your project?

At the end of the project, I will know whether it is worth continuing to pay for these subscriptions - I will evaluate by emailing Bullseye users for their feedback on the tool in general and these feeds in particular.

Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

There will be no in-person events.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more specific to your project:

Number of total participants
Number of articles created or improved (if applicable)
Number of photos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (if applicable)
Number of photos used on Wikimedia projects (if applicable)

I will add metrics to Bullseye to track its usage (this addresses the "number of participants" metric), and I will use the aforementioned requests for feedback to determine whether the target audience found the paid feeds to be useful.

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is the organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

I am the organizer and primary contributor to the project, and am not receiving any funding or support (nor do I intend to seek any beyond this funding request for subscriptions). I am happy to have other editors contribute to the tool, and the code is open source.

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense:

Spur, 50k query pack: $99/month, $1188 for one year. Spur is a very effective proxy-detection service which is used by a number of checkusers to identify some hard-to-detect types of proxies.
Shodan, "Freelancer" subscription: $59/month, $708 for one year. Shodan's API provides a good deal of technical information about internet-connected devices, and is very useful in identifying proxies.

Endorsements

This tool is of critical importance to anti-abuse efforts as, at minimum, a stopgap measure while the problems described in phab:T265845 (non-public due to security concerns) are addressed. This tool allows checkusers to detect and respond to one particularly vicious kind of abuse. The value-to-money ratio here is extremely good and I urge full funding for this grant. Best, KevinL (aka L235 · t) 21:40, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
This would be great value for money, and the grantee is experienced in this area which suggests the project will be successful, or at least useful. I would also urge full funding for this grant. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 18:03, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
I'm a user of Bullseye, as well as Shodan and Spur advanced APIs. Bringing Shodan and Spur data to all relevant stakeholders in the movement will be worth every penny. MarioGom (talk) 19:49, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
This would be an incredibly worthwhile use of funds given the benefit Bullseye provides to volunteers working with IPs. Vermont (talk) 22:04, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
I use this tool regularly, and the proposed grant represents extremely good VFM. Ultimately it would be a drop in the ocean in WMF budgetary terms, but make a real difference to anti-abuse efforts. I strongly recommend this be funded in full. firefly ( t · c ) 16:33, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Useful tool to have for those that dedicate themselves to anti-abuse tasks. Endorse. —MarcoAurelio (talk) 09:10, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
This tool is very good and useful, i use this tool often.--𝐖𝐢𝐤𝐢𝐁𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫 👤💬 07:25, 1 October 2022 (UTC)