On Mon, 28 May 2012 09:02:35 -0700, MZMcBride <z(a)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.
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://daniel.friesen.name]