In my experience, marking patches as WIP doesn't really help. I still get reviews and comments for these patches. While I appreciate that, it's also kind of annoying.
The private feature allows me to draft my patches and to get them in a reviewable state without getting interrupted. Same if you want to work with other people on something, which is meant to be public later. Also this way, I don't create spam mails and I don't use the ressources of the build infrastructure unnecessarily.
So I used the private feature a lot. I understand if people don't want this to be enable again, but I rather would like to have this than not. If people really want their patches to be private (for whatever reasons), then they shouldn't upload them anywhere. Or they should use their own repository, maybe on their own git server, where they have full control over the access permissions. In my case, this gives me more possibilities to collaborate with others and this is how I understand it. It's easier to add someone as reviewer than "create a gitlab/github account, pull the repository from there and create a pull request if you want".
However, I think we should rather document that our Gerrit instance isn't the right place for hosting others critical content or actual private patches, that it shouldn't be used for such things and that it's a possibility for structuring and collaboration.
Is it possible to rename the label to something else, so that it doesn't sound so strong anymore? Like "hidden", for example. Or does this need changes in its code?
// Felix