Brion Vibber wrote:
I'm not sure what Tim is referring to.
There's support for using a shared user table for multiple wikis; that can't be used for our sites as it came two years or so too late. Accounts are already established separately on each wiki which can't be automatically resolved in a clean way, so this has never been an option.
Yes it can. We've talked about conflict resolution methods before. We merge accounts that are the same person, remove clashing accounts that have no contributions and for the small percentage of genuine clashes, I've suggested allocating them on a first-come first-served basis and requiring the others to change their name. Others have suggested giving the name to the person who most deserves it, as judged by some as yet unspecified process involving discretion.
This is why JeLuF split off the user_rights table, so that we could implement shared usernames but have permissions local to each wiki.
It's not clean, but it's not impossible. And in the long term it will leave us with a very good user experience. As I said, it requires conversion software and system administrator bravery.
-- Tim Starling