Hi.
Brion Vibber wrote:
IMO we should strongly discourage use of multiple accounts with the same email to the point of forbidding it in software for new accounts.[1]
MediaWiki currently has constraints requiring that user IDs and user names be unique. Why make user e-mail addresses unique? As you note, it's a fairly low bar for users to bypass such a constraint and there are use-cases for allowing multiple accounts to share an e-mail address.
Figuring out how to migrate those old accounts is something that needs to be considered and worked out, but it shouldn't hold up work on making the login/reset form accept email addresses for the common case.
I believe password reset via e-mail address is already implemented. :-)
[1] I personally have a bunch of test accounts that probably have the same email, and I'm sure some folks have bots and other things set up similarly. Note that many email providers including Gmail allow email aliases with "+" and something else after your mailbox name, such as 'johndoe+testing99 at wikimedia.org'; I've used this in the past to have separate accounts on one email for Apple and other providers as well.
It's probably difficult to estimate, but I wonder what percentage of users are currently using a mail provider that supports this type of behavior. On the one hand, I thought Gmail/Google Apps was alone in supporting account+something@example.com functionality, but on the other hand, nearly everybody seems to be using Gmail/Google Apps these days.
I also wonder how many users would be affected by making e-mail addresses unique on a large wiki. That is, how many instances are there of two or more accounts using the same confirmed e-mail address on the German or French or English Wikipedia? We should be able to query this information, which I think would provide useful context and understanding.
MZMcBride