Hi. Brion Vibber wrote: >IMO we should strongly discourage use of multiple accounts with the same >email to the point of forbidding it in software for new accounts.[1]
MediaWiki currently has constraints requiring that user IDs and user names be unique. Why make user e-mail addresses unique? As you note, it's a fairly low bar for users to bypass such a constraint and there are use-cases for allowing multiple accounts to share an e-mail address. >Figuring out how to migrate those old accounts is something that needs to >be considered and worked out, but it shouldn't hold up work on making the >login/reset form accept email addresses for the common case. I believe password reset via e-mail address is already implemented. :-) >[1] I personally have a bunch of test accounts that probably have the same >email, and I'm sure some folks have bots and other things set up >similarly. Note that many email providers including Gmail allow email >aliases with "+" and something else after your mailbox name, such as >'johndoe+testing99 at wikimedia.org'; I've used this in the past to have >separate accounts on one email for Apple and other providers as well. It's probably difficult to estimate, but I wonder what percentage of users are currently using a mail provider that supports this type of behavior. On the one hand, I thought Gmail/Google Apps was alone in supporting [email protected] functionality, but on the other hand, nearly everybody seems to be using Gmail/Google Apps these days. I also wonder how many users would be affected by making e-mail addresses unique on a large wiki. That is, how many instances are there of two or more accounts using the same confirmed e-mail address on the German or French or English Wikipedia? We should be able to query this information, which I think would provide useful context and understanding. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
