Last modified: 2006-06-20 23:45:00 UTC

Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Wikimedia migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator. Bug reports are handled in Wikimedia Phabricator.
This static website is read-only and for historical purposes. It is not possible to log in and except for displaying bug reports and their history, links might be broken. See T7550, the corresponding Phabricator task for complete and up-to-date bug report information.
Bug 5550 - Make logins not be case sensitive
Make logins not be case sensitive
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
User login and signup (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Normal enhancement with 1 vote (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2006-04-12 12:03 UTC by Ted Fines
Modified: 2006-06-20 23:45 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Ted Fines 2006-04-12 12:03:36 UTC
We're new to Mediawiki so if this has been discussed to death, sorry!  We found that one of 
the first things we wanted to do is make logins not be case sensitive.  We wrote a small 
patch for SpecialUserlogin.php which is available at:
http://netwiki.macalester.edu:8080/index.php/Public_Pages

We found that most users do not expect a case-sensitive username, and so would 
inadvertently create multiple accounts (e.g. USER and user) and get confused.  

While I realize Unix user logins are case-sensitive, the trend today is toward an LDAP 
backend directory to serve multiple systems as an authenticator and user database.  LDAP 
isn't case sensitive with usernames, and maybe MediaWiki shouldn't be, either?

Anyway, for your consideration.  Thanks for the great software!
Comment 1 Rob Church 2006-06-20 23:10:55 UTC
This isn't the place to publish hacks for MediaWiki. Please create a new page on Meta 
or MediaWiki.org.
Comment 2 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2006-06-20 23:45:00 UTC
It *is* a place to publish proposed patches to implement requested enhancements
into the main code, which is what's being published.

I think fixing this would be a good idea, in fact.  See also Bug 1524, which
more specifically relates to *visual* confusability, but could be extended to
semantic confusability as well by doing a few extra things (normalizing all
Latin/Cyrillic/Greek characters to lowercase, normalizing all digraphs to their
constituents, probably some normalization in scripts I'm not familiar with as
well).  It's fairly easy to confuse "Fizzlebob" with "FizzleBob" or whatever,
certainly.

Reopen?  Of course, this new restriction should only be applied at user
creation, not to preexisting names.

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.


Navigation
Links