Last modified: 2013-11-30 09:04:08 UTC
bug 1432 addressed a number of different requests. The bug there in general is useless, however there was one potentially useful feature idea. Perhaps a method of linking user accounts back to a primary account. The use of this feature is limited only by local policies. On wiki that allow use of multiple user accounts, this could be use to connect a group of accounts together to one user. Or on wiki like Wikipedia this could be used to allow a user to link bot accounts to their user account. But extensions could even hook in and add extra functionality, perhaps for things like auto redirection of talkpages, or making the new-message notification show up for all users. The one builtin feature for this involves user subpages. An account would be able to edit the .css and .js subpages of any account linked to the same master account as it. This way a user would be able to edit the interface stuff for it's other accounts. Such as their bots, without needing to change their login. This could be especially useful if extensions like [[mw:Extension:KeepYourHandsToYourself]], [[mw:Extension:EditOnlyYourOwnPage]] were installed, because those extensions limit user page editing even further.
Sorry, a number got stripped out. That's bug 14326 not 1432.
This sounds like a very specific use case that would typically be added by an extension. Changing categorisation and priorities.
More general/applicable use cases include support for things like echo forwarding notifications from secondary accounts (Bug 48892), tracking user renames more easily, and also issues with finding the owners of cross-project bots and other cross-project use with SUL in general, since otherwise folks need to manually redirect their secondary accounts to their main account on many projects, which gets confusing/ridiculous. So yeah, this is something that we probably do want now and definitely will in the future with SUL as more features begin to support global accounts and usage.