On Sun, 27 May 2012 21:18:26 -0700, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 28/05/12 03:50, Raimond Spekking wrote:
Since MediaWiki 1.18 we have the variable $wgUseCombinedLoginLink [1] which is set to true per default.
During edit workshops with students and seniors I registered that new editors are confused about the combined login page. They tried to register new accounts on the login page.
Surely, these observations are not representative but I think that the usability could be improved by setting $wgUseCombinedLoginLink=false
If I missed a prior discussion about this issue I apologize and would be happy if someone could point me to the discussion.
Otherwise I suggest to set $wgUseCombinedLoginLink to false for all WMF wikis.
Can't it be set to false by default?
They were combined to start with because the forms were combined. Then the developer who split the forms was too lazy to fix the skins, so for years, everyone who wanted to create an account was forced to click through the login page. I always figured it was a bug. Why would anyone want them combined?
-- Tim Starling
+1
I created $wgUseCombinedLoginLink partially due to skinning where some skins want to have separate links to style in different ways (Skin has a method that lets a skin override the setting for itself) and also looking at a number of other websites and finding that we are practically the only website that does something like that.
I set it to true by default because that was the current expected behavior and didn't want to bother with the usual backlash from the en.wp community whenever you touch anything to do with how MW looks or the markup it outputs.
But if we have found a usability reason to have separate links then I see absolutely no reason to set it false by default on all wiki. In fact I'd almost say we could go ahead and delete the setting and make MW always have two separate links.