Remove GCVote

Last days there are several reports on support mail and social media that cache loading gets stuck/slow in the phase of “Loading GCVote”. Own test also shows, that the server (sometimes not always) fails to reply.

As this service is active for most users (as it defaults to “on” for retrieving votes also if the user has no login to send votes) it causes a severe regression as cache refreshes take much longer.

As the service is almost discontinued it looks like the right time to remove it (maybe even on release as a “bug fix”).

As a successor is discussed in #9664 we should maybe not throw away the UI part of the code though.

[Lineflyer]

As I still see it responds quite unreliable, we also still get complaints about slow refresh of caches and given the current unmaintained status of GCVote I think the proposal of @moving-bits is a good compromise.

[moving-bits]

I could prepare a PR which

• sets GCVote default to “disabled” (which would only affect new users), and
• set GCVote state to “disabled” for all users

Users which want to continue using GCVote can re-enable it. (The forced change should be mentioned in the changelog…)

This could be an intermediary step until we have decided on how to proceed with GCVote.

What do you think?