Rob Lanphier wrote:
I'm in the process of writing a AuthPlugin for bbPress, so that the WordPress folks can do single sign-on between their user forums and their MediaWiki install. First release is here: http://codex.wordpress.org/User:RobLa/bbPress_Auth_for_MediaWiki
One thing I'm having trouble with is the case sensitivity issue. bbPress isn't case sensitive. MediaWiki is. This makes logging in relatively simple. As it turns out, I accidentally leveraged SQLs default case-insensitivity in my first crack at this.
I've thought about this issue before (when a friend asked me if one could make article titles entirely case-insensitive).
Personally, I believe the best approach would be the following. Have all the names (article titles in the 'page' table in his case, usernames in the 'user' table in your case) be entirely lower-case and define that as the "canonical form". Then when someone tries to log in as "RobLA" it will search for "robla" and find it.
Then add another column to that table, 'displayname' or something, which contains the username with the capitalisation the user prefers. In Recent Changes, Watchlists, Histories, everything where a username is shown, you use that, but in URLs you use the lower-case form.
Personally, I would prefer if usernames on Wikipedia were entirely case-insensitive. Then again, I think article titles should be case-insensitive too, but that would be quite a radical change.
Timwi