[Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Can't log in to Meta

[Richard Grevers]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:40:19 -0800 (PST), Brion Vibber 
<vibber at aludra.usc.edu> wrote:

>> I wasn't aware of that, because I'm not aware of it being stated clearly
>> anywhere (the login page would be a good place!).
>
> I'll add a note.

Thanks!
>
>> Is that why there are no
>> links from the english wiki to meta.wikipedia.org?
>
> I'm not quite sure what you mean -- there are numerous links to meta from
> the main page, recentchanges, and various other places.

It took 30 seconds but I found it (the main page is rather, um, link rich)
>
>> This raises another question: What provision is there to prevent someone
>> else grabbing my wikipedia.en username on the meta wiki and appearing to 
>> be
>> me? Or to prevent me registering as, say, Susan Mason on meta?
>
> The same thing that prevents someone else from grabbing your wikipedia.en
> username on slashdot.org or yahoo.com: politeness and/or lack of interest
> in doing so.
>
But I would never expect the latter with other sites. However, the 
separation between wikis is not at all evident to the newcomer. Indeed, my 
first assumption was of a single user database across all wikipedia 
entities.

While we are discussing log-ins, what is the expiry time for keeping logged 
in status? It seems to be rather short - only an hour or so. While I don't 
necessarily want to use cross-session cookies, it would be nice to stay 
logged in for an entire browser session. Sometimes I find that I have 
edited an article anonymously because my login has expired in the meantime.
One option could be to default to session-long logins but to have a 
checkbox "this is a public computer" which would introduce a 30 or 60 
minute limit.


-- 
Richard Grevers