A little talk with Jack in IRC gave me a little idea on how to deal with the fact that we can't rename users with a Shared DB to grant to those needing a rename, and we have vandals using usernames to create permanent vandalism.
The first idea is a way to deal with the users vandalizing by creating bad usernames. Deleting users from the DB isn't something that will work out because of the references to the user, and renaming won't work either with the many DB's. But let's consider where the names actually do the damage... Userpages and talkpages aren't an issue because they can be deleted, and contributions aren't either because the references to them disappear from view when deleted. The real issue with the names is on the Listusers page. An idea may be to 'delete' a user in much the way that we delete a revision. When a page is deleted it is never wiped from the DB, in fact, we have a rev_deleted column which when set to 1 makes MediaWiki ignore that page in publicly visible areas. Right now, the only publicly visible area that a username shows up without management, is the Listuserspage, and we've already had that hacked up to make way for the active users only listing feature inside of it. Why not add a user_deleted column to the user table, and add a line or two to SpecialListusers.php to make it ignore users who have "user_deleted = 1", then they won't be shown. A quick special page and a log can allow staff to hide a user and prevent misuse, and if you want to still be able to find hidden users. You can either leave that to the special page, or add a mode to the Special page to list hidden users to, just like with the Active users functionality already there. The next thought is for those users who need or want to move to a new name. It's not possible to go around renaming a user, but what about staff only re-attribution of a select set of user's edits, log entries, etc... Check off individual ones, or re-attribute them all. Another log can manage this to. And we have Lookupcontribs to find where re-attribution needs to be done. ((Do remember my mentality... I know someone said they were working on something like that... But this isn't a note suggesting a new thing... But more of my way of saying "You're taking to long to code it... If people like the idea, I may just code it on my own..." example a' la Special:RightsControl, served people well up till 1.11a when they finally added that feature to core)) -- ~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of The Gaiapedia, Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project, and Wiki-Tools.com _______________________________________________ Wikia-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
