On Sun, 22 Sep 2024 13:40:12 -0700 Maureen Mead via MediaWiki-l mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Now they are toying with the idea of a paywall. Perhaps some parts of the site would be visible. A few pages of the day as a teaser, etc.
But they’d like to have a membership/paywall a visitor must join to access the pages. And since they are completely non-technical, the simplest, but more importantly, most SECURE is the driving force.
I'm not aware of any free software MediaWiki extension that implements this, but I can recommend a possible approach you can take about this.
I recommend splitting off the paywalled content to a completely different wiki. As you have discovered, implementing the kind of needed granular access control for something like this to be possible on a single wiki is just a bad idea: MediaWiki wasn't built for this, and every extension that promises to implement this will have some kind of way around your paywall.
So that's why I recommend creating a completely different wiki with the paywalled content. You should setup this new wiki as a private wiki[1]. What I'd do then is setup some kind of site where you can purchase access and have that site automatically create an account for them on this wiki, for example, by adding them to an LDAP group and using the LDAPAuthentication2[2] and LDAPAuthorization[3] extensions or just using the MediaWiki API.
simplest
There's no simple solution to this if using MediaWiki is absolutely required.
version 1.34.5
Please, _please_ upgrade, the longer this is delayed the more painful it will be. I highly recommend checking out the LTS MediaWiki releases[2]. The current LTS is 1.39 although the upcoming 1.43 will also be an LTS.
[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Simple_private_wiki [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LDAPAuthentication2 [3]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LDAPAuthorization [4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Version_lifecycle#Release_policy