On 03/06/2014 05:07 PM, Chris McMahon wrote:
Beyond that, there are serious concerns with any feature that a) requires javascript support in the client in order to create an account on the wiki and b) does not honor the characters that the user types in the username and password fields.
I agree there were issues that could have been solved with better communication and consensus. However, the above is not accurate.
a) JavaScript was not required to create an account. However, it did show a confirmation screen, which required you to type more on Mobile (this would have been caught with more testing).
b) This is a long-standing MW issue, not an issue with the recent patch. In fact, it's the reason behind the patch. MW has always converted 'lower case' to 'Lower_case'). The goal of the recent patch was to let the user know early on (and give them a chance to reconsider username), so they're not surprised after signup.
You're right that in addition to the warning, it did the change client-side in a different way (at the last moment, on submit, not while typing), but what they typed was not 100% honored before either.
That goal may not have been accomplished in the best way (and we can even debate whether any UX change is required here), but it is not fair or accurate to blame MW's longstanding username canonicalization on this patch.
Also, the password was only affected in that it was cleared on submit, which applies to all warnings and errors.
Matt Flaschen