Ironic: That this is happening after months of "Bitcoin Classic" advocates howling incorrectly about soft-forks silently downgrading the level of validation their nodes do... Doubly ironic: If changes like this were hardforks users of under-maintained projects like "Bitcoin Classic" and Bitcoin XT would be forced by the change to use Bitcoin Core instead of their preferred software.
Well the whole point of Classic is to create a program that "looks like Bitcoin but isn't Bitcoin", but shows something scary and blows up spectaculary at a pre-arranged date, so that wall street can release their media articles and dump their hoard to crash the price.
We copy Bitcoin and crash the copy, nobody will notice a difference. LOL fake news are so 17th century. It's already priced in, move on nothing to see here.