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.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 4:59 PM, Robert Hagens
<rhagens(a)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(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.