Support Identity Team with Discussion Frontend

[JamieB-gu]

[ioannakok]

This repo is deprecated and is also using deprecated identity functionality: https://github.com/guardian/discussion-frontend

It is responsible for the comment count and sign in / profile avatar info for articles that are still rendered by frontend and have discussion enabled.

Moving forward we have three options:

1. Temporarily remove this piece of functionality until we can migrate these articles to DCAR. Draft PR: https://github.com/guardian/frontend/pull/27427
2. Re-write this functionality in frontend and update the identity code. The old code is using an old identity api cookie.
3. Migrate crosswords, galleries and audio articles to DCAR.

[shesah]

@shesah and @CDicksonG to speak to the I&T team to see which option from above is best.

[ioannakok]

From this document by the Identity team:

"Each crossword page has a comment section. This section makes two calls to our legacy platform using legacy identity cookies, which are then returned in headers. The two calls originate from:

1. The comment feed
2. The ‘Signed in as…’ component in the left-hand sidebar"

From our investigation, we think the calls are made only by this section, not by the comment feed.

@JamieB-gu do you perhaps know why they're saying one of the calls comes from the comment feed?

[CDicksonG]

We will clarify exactly what we need to turn off and then have conversations with the right people in Editorial

[ioannakok]

@JamieB-gu and myself clarified today with @pvighi that we only need to turn off the box with the comment count and avatar info highlighted in the screenshots above. This will happen only for articles that are still rendered by frontend, i.e. crosswords, galleries and audio articles.