As promised, I’ve disabled the old BotQuery interface, ancestor to MediaWiki’s current machine-readable query API.
It served many for a couple of fine years, but just wasn’t being actively maintained any more, leading to bitrot and general difficulties patching things when security issues came up.
Any remaining users of the old interface should be updated to use the current API, which is pretty similar for most cases and shouldn’t be very hard.
In happier news, I’ve enabled the write features for the API generally (they’ve been on on test.wikipedia.org for a while) so let’s see how they roll. :D