On 8/15/06, Filip Maljkovic dungodung@gmail.com wrote:
How about completely rewriting the permissions system? I mean, while you're doing all of this, you might as well do something a bit harder, but better (in wider perspective). The current system can lead to confusion and it has some setbacks (e.g. rights are additive) and the new system would be totally flexible and prone to all variations. If I knew PHP, I'd write it ;)
The rights-are-additive setback is hard to address altogether--you'd probably want to introduce "magnitudes" of permission or somesuch, maybe false being negative and true being positive, so you can add together all the magnitudes to get the result, but that's totally overkill. Unless you want to merge the blocking system with the permissions system, I suppose . . . in principle that could be handy to some degree (e.g. blocking someone just from uploading files), but it's almost certainly not worth the effort unless someone's going to totally rewrite one or both of the systems anyway. We don't need such granularity with blocking, I don't think: verbal "bans" that are enforced by total blocks work fine on enwiki, certainly.
Are there any other particular failings of the current system?