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 $wgUseCombinedLoginLink to false for all WMF wikis.
Raimond.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUseCombinedLoginLink
Hi Raimond,
I don't recall discussions on this topic. I think this change should be reviewed for usability, but it seems on the surface an improvement. It's worth filing a shell bug if the discussion here turns out well or goes by with no comment. In fact, we should probably just enable it on mediawiki.org if there's no objection on list.
Note, there's been a lot of research in this area: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project
I'm not in a good position to summarize this (would need to read it first) ;-), but I imagine that it's at least a little relevant to a decision on this.
I'll see if I can nudge someone more directly involved with usability to comment.
Rob
On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Raimond Spekking raimond.spekking@gmail.com 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 $wgUseCombinedLoginLink to false for all WMF wikis.
Raimond.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUseCombinedLoginLink
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 12:43 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
or goes by with no comment. In fact, we should probably just enable it on mediawiki.org if there's no objection on list.
Lets not? A. Stuff like this should be the same no matter where you are on the cluster B. The MW Wiki community is more the developer side of things so I doubt there is as many people having issues understanding it C. This whole "lets test every little thing on MW Wiki" seems misplaced, since we are a smaller more aimed project wiki (Development of MediaWiki and subsequent support)
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
Tim Starling 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?
Someone might want the links combined if they present both the create account and login forms on the same page. Wikia used to do this. Twitter and Facebook do this currently at https://twitter.com/ and https://www.facebook.com when you're not logged in. This is not a reason to not flip the default on Wikimedia wikis, but it is perhaps a reason to keep the configuration variable around.
I'll also note that creating an account is still considered a sub-type of logging in (Special:UserLogin?type=signup), though Special:CreateAccount properly redirects. I think it's a bit strange that they are not two separate forms completely (Special:UserLogin and Special:CreateAccount).
MZMcBride
Am 28.05.2012 18:02, schrieb MZMcBride:
Someone might want the links combined if they present both the create account and login forms on the same page. Wikia used to do this. Twitter and Facebook do this currently at https://twitter.com/ and https://www.facebook.com when you're not logged in.
Yes, but both forms are better than our 2 forms because they have the input fields for login and registration on _one_ page. IMO more clearly for newbies.
This is not a reason
to not flip the default on Wikimedia wikis, but it is perhaps a reason to keep the configuration variable around.
Sure, keep the config var for b/c.
I'll also note that creating an account is still considered a sub-type of logging in (Special:UserLogin?type=signup), though Special:CreateAccount properly redirects. I think it's a bit strange that they are not two separate forms completely (Special:UserLogin and Special:CreateAccount).
That's bug 15700 https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15700
MZMcBride
Raimond.
On Mon, 28 May 2012 09:02:35 -0700, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Tim Starling 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?
Someone might want the links combined if they present both the create account and login forms on the same page. Wikia used to do this. Twitter and Facebook do this currently at https://twitter.com/ and https://www.facebook.com when you're not logged in. This is not a reason to not flip the default on Wikimedia wikis, but it is perhaps a reason to keep the configuration variable around.
Facebook and Twitter do that on their homepage and don't even bother with login links. The design of those doesn't really fit discussion of login page links.
- To have a combined form like that you have to create a brand new special page; you can't do that within our current Special:UserLogin - We don't provide a way to simply override the special page used for login links Hence with these two facts that means it's impossible to make an alternate login form without replacing stuff inside the personal_urls by using hooks and constructing your own arrays to put in the list. Wikia doesn't even bother with hooks, they just make core modifications for this stuff.
So I don't believe this or anything Wikia does on the topic is a valid reason to keep the configuration setting around. It's not needed for those kind of modifications. Heck, it's because of one of Wikia's old skins that I split the links in the first place.
I'll also note that creating an account is still considered a sub-type of logging in (Special:UserLogin?type=signup), though Special:CreateAccount properly redirects. I think it's a bit strange that they are not two separate forms completely (Special:UserLogin and Special:CreateAccount).
MZMcBride
I believe there are some backend bits that still link the two together. Though perhaps someone can still manage to make the create account form served from Special:CreateAccount while the backend is still in that state. Though, this area of MW has probably been overdue for an overhaul for awhile.
On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.comwrote:
- To have a combined form like that you have to create a brand new special
page; you can't do that within our current Special:UserLogin
- We don't provide a way to simply override the special page used for
login links Hence with these two facts that means it's impossible to make an alternate login form without replacing stuff inside the personal_urls by using hooks and constructing your own arrays to put in the list. Wikia doesn't even bother with hooks, they just make core modifications for this stuff.
Just FYI, work is being done to decouple account creation from Special:UserLogin. The initial SignupAPI extension was a GSOC project, and it's currently undergoing code review etc. This should allow us to implement some long overdue improvements, such as: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34447
The relevant bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36225
Steven
On 28 May 2012 22:14, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.comwrote:
- To have a combined form like that you have to create a brand new
special
page; you can't do that within our current Special:UserLogin
- We don't provide a way to simply override the special page used for
login links Hence with these two facts that means it's impossible to make an
alternate
login form without replacing stuff inside the personal_urls by using
hooks
and constructing your own arrays to put in the list. Wikia doesn't even bother with hooks, they just make core modifications for this stuff.
Just FYI, work is being done to decouple account creation from Special:UserLogin. The initial SignupAPI extension was a GSOC project, and it's currently undergoing code review etc. This should allow us to implement some long overdue improvements, such as: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34447
The relevant bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36225
This corner of MediaWiki is horrifically old and rusty; I tried a big refactoring a while ago but it broke CentralAuth and so got pulled a couple of times. I might have another go now we have labs up and running and we can easily set up a SUL domain to match the cluster's. SignupAPI basically copied mountains of code from LoginForm, IIRC; wasn't a real refactoring (could be mis-remembering though).
--HM
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.
On Sun, 27 May 2012 10:50:44 -0700, Raimond Spekking raimond.spekking@gmail.com 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 $wgUseCombinedLoginLink to false for all WMF wikis.
Raimond.
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUseCombinedLoginLink
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/19781
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org