Userrights uses @ for steward type userright changes (managing userrights cross-wiki).
For that reason @ has been made an illegal character in usernames for quite some time now.
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George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Robert Hagens rhagens@envysion.com wrote:
Are there special semantics associated with a user name such that if there is an at sign, mediawiki assumes different properties about the user? For example, if I have a user 'a@b.c' and I try to edit that user's rights, I get an error "Database b.c does not exist or is not local."
The main mediawiki server and DB do the right thing with @ symbols, but the user rights tools can't. There's a user on english wikipedia with one of those, it's a known issue.
New MW distributions apparently default to not letting you set up accounts with @ symbols in them, though I haven't tested that.