Evening All,

I was put in charge of administering a wikimedia site, and I'm still a bit new to all of it's functionality. Here are my two questions:

1)I need a way to create 50 accounts quickly. In other words to Batch create accounts. All the permissions are the same. So, in my attempts I made this script: (changed the names of host user and dbpass for security in the real script the match) similar to: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-October/007558.html

The problem with this script is that the accounts get created but it seems that that the passwords are not. So I'll have accounts a, b, c, but the password fields are left blank for some reason. I tried checking the passwords an the back end but they are salted for security. Why is this happening? Or is there an easier way to batch create accounts?

2) I have a wiki and in this wiki some of the pages can be viewed without login in and the rest you need to be logged in. Now say that I want to have a link from my other website into my wiki’s password protected section. Is there a way that I could authenticate myself without using the wiki’s login page, -say maybe pass the credentials in the header? Any other suggestions?

Steve