Brion Vibber wrote:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
Hi there...Sheldon Rampton here, at Disinfopedia. After some irritating and time-consuming encounters with trolls, we have decided that we want to be able to require contributors to register and to provide a confirmed email address when they do so.
It would separately be nice to require that an e-mail address _if given_ be confirmed, even where having an address is not itself required. (The main concern here being the possibility of using wiki accounts to send interuser e-mail with false return addresses.)
Reconfirmation would need to be required when the user changes the address stored in their preferences; this leads to the possibility of storing 'confirmed' and 'new' e-mail addresses to tide over the time between changing and confirming.
(It *is* necessary to allow people to change their addresses. In the real world, people gain and lose e-mail access at various institutions over the course of their online lives.)
The address-required mode that Sheldon would like could then basically require that the confirmed address be set in order to allow login.
For upwards compatibility on upgrading existing wikis, I'd recommend using user_email for the 'unconfirmed' address and adding something like 'user_confirmed_email' for the confirmed one; thus users would be given the opportunity to confirm their e-mail address when they next visit. (But not doing so would not disable their accounts. Might show a message up top akin to the 'new messages' notification.)
I started writing a feature which did exactly that. An extra email field in the user table, Special:Userlogin modifications to allow email confirmation, even IIRC a modification to Article.php and User.php to inform users that they can't post because they haven't confirmed. My intention was to use this feature to allow Halifax residents to contribute to Wikipedia if they have a confirmed email address, hence I also made some changes to ipblocks to allow email confirmation to be switched on and off depending on IP address. I got maybe 60% of the way through it before deciding that it wasn't such an important feature for Wikipedia, and I shelved it. I'll see if I can dig up and post what I've done.
-- Tim Starling