[Mediawiki-l] Changing user names in the DB

[Rob Church]

On 06/09/07, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] <sullivan at mail.nih.gov> wrote:
> Can usernames be changed?  I know users cannot be deleted and I do not
> want to do that, but we have a situation where the authentication
> mechanism is moving from local accounts created in the wiki to an
> external authentication mechanism, so, for example, user "joe" is user
> "joed" in the external authentication mechanism.  Is there a way to
> change the user "joe" to "joed" in the wiki database?  The page
> histories can show either user ID, that is not important.  Also, I'll
> need to set all the user passwords to null.  I suspect I'll need to do
> that through an SQL routine but if there is a better way...

The RenameUser extension is the "correct" method to rename user
accounts and update all the various page histories, etc. You'd need to
resort to a bit of manual SQL to reset the passwords, though.


Rob Church