2011/2/17 Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com>om>:
The reason I set to add it was that loggin in on
not-too-used sites
actually short lived my long sessions.
Bug 24471 [1] explains a similar problem although you have to read [2]
to understand it.
My take on all this is that it would be useful to articulate some
high-level principles that inform any design changes to the user
account system. I would start with these:
1) Users shouldn't have to care about the account creation system
beyond remembering their usernames and passwords;
2) Users shouldn't have to worry where in the Wikimedia-verse they are
at any given time, and should get a consistent experience;
3) The user experience should hide any additional complexity that may
result from a desire to protect privacy, etc.
The experience that Sage describes in bug 24471 of not being
consistently logged in arguably shouldn't occur in the first place per
1). Can we log the user into _all_ public Wikimedia wikis without
incurring an unacceptable performance penalty? If so, how?
The issue with regard to privacy disclosures through account creation
logs is one that we should try to fix for the user per 2) and 3)
without the user needing to worry about it. All the same links should
be there, you shouldn't have to confirm anything when you edit a page,
etc. And you certainly shouldn't have to explicitly create an account
with an additional one-click operation. It may require, per one of
Brion's suggestions, to have some kind of shadow account system in the
backend that's used until/unless a fully created user account is
required, or to flag the account in a certain way.
Finally, I completely concur with Brion that the additional "Log in
globally" checkbox should be removed, and a better solution be sought,
per 1). It's not something that users should need to think about.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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