On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 14:20:20 -0500, Jamie Bliss astronouth7303@gmail.com wrote:
If an admin wants to implement a more advanced system (eg, for every group (user, bureaucrat, sysop, developer, and bot) have a seperate whitelist and blacklist), that can probably be implemented by expanding sections of code that use the variable $wgWhitelistRead (in my quick scan, that's User.php lines 638-662 and Title.php lines 835-856, though there may be more). Though implementing such a massive change will make upgrading a lot of work.
The whole user rights system is getting an overhaul in the near future anyway, so the rather unwieldy "user, bureaucrat, sysop, developer, and bot"-based system will give way to something far more manipulable. As far as I know, no-one's yet written code for using this for controlling access to individual articles (or regexes of articles), but it would make a lot of sense to build any such system on what will hopefully be ready by 1.5 (not, unfortunately, 1.4). See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:User_levels for roughly how the current implementation operates at the end-user level.