[Mediawiki-l] user_password field changed in 1.13?

[Richard K Miller]

It appears the user.user_password field changed in the upgrade from  
1.12 to 1.13, but I didn't see any mention of it in the Release Notes.

I'm using $wgPasswordSalt = false so I can connect mod_auth_mysql to  
the user table for password protection. (See my blog post at http://tinyurl.com/y7ue8k)

In MediaWiki 1.13, with password salting turned off, the password 32  
byte MD5 hash is now prepended with a letter and the user_id. For  
example:

76cecfa967423834abdbd1c8a8ac4125 (user_password in 1.12)
:B:1:76cecfa967423834abdbd1c8a8ac4125 (user_password in 1.13)

Could someone please point me to information about this change? Is it  
possible to disable this password prefix so it will continue to be  
only an MD5 hash?

Best regards,
Richard