Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:08 UTC
Usernames are displayed as plaintext in the page history. While not normally a problem, some projects require pre-existing authentication accounts that are directly tied to an email address. (e.g. username GSC127 is tied to GSC127@psu.edu. Penn State has 100,000+ existing access accounts) I propose an option to display usernames as small pictures, to hinder attempts to harvest mass emails for spam. www.thefacebook.com already has this type of protection scheme.
The big problem with this is that the username still has to appear as text at some level anyway, in order to link to the User: page, contributions, etc (you can have a picture as the link, but you've still got to have the link target as text in the source). The better solution would therefore seem to be for the organisers of a project not to use usernames linked to e-mail addresses in this way. For instance, a sign-up system could be created that verifies existing credentials during account creation, while allowing the user to choose their own username for the new system - I think some of the uses of AuthPlugin.php do something along these lines. As for your PSU example, however, I feel the ability to spider history entries on a wiki is somewhat outwheighed by the ability to access a nicely uniform list of every single user account, including their account name/e-mail address: http://www.personal.psu.edu/web_pages/users.html Marking this as "WONTFIX", because it doesn't seem feasible to me.
