On Tuesday, 29th August 2006 at 11:16:26 (GMT -0700), George Herbert wrote:
Easy solution (from a moving forwards point of view): get everyone to change usernames to ones that MediaWiki can handle, and use the Restrict Username stuff on the PHPBB side.
Thank you for your suggestions. This is, however, not practicable and wouldn't be fair in this Unicode day and age. Most people's names in this country contain a few diacritic letters. Telling them they cannot use their real names to contribute to the wiki is like telling you you cannot sign your contributions as George Herbert but must use, for instance, Heorh Alvert instead, because for some strange reason the ordinary letters "G" and "B" cannot be processed by our wiki. ;-))
So the only fair solution for the moment seemed to be to give up on phpBB integration. I think one possible source of the problem is that, unlike MediaWiki, phpBB is still distributed in iso-8859-1 as the default encoding, not UTF-8. We managed to convert phpBB into UTF-8 manually, but it might be that in doing so the usernames tables got modified in a way that prevents MediaWiki from properly reading diacritic letters contained in usernames tables.
Anyway, there hasn't been the slightest problem within phpBB itself after we converted it into UTF-8. The problem only occurs when MediaWiki tries to read phpBB's usernames table to allow users to sign in...