Page MenuHomePhabricator

RealName Userlinks instead of UserName
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Author: reinhard.brandstaedter

Description:
When users log in with an userid, links in page history, recent changes etc. are
shown with this ID as link-text. If this userid however is not very human
friendly (maybe just a number) it's difficult to immediately see who made the
changes.
This is especially true if one uses an existing authentication backend such as
LDAP where the userid might not be a common understood name.
e.g.:
my unique login ID (which I use in many other systems) in LDAP is "AK123456"
my real name (which might not be unique) is "Reinhard Brandstaedter"
my nickname is "ReinhardBrandstaedter"

With the LDAPAuthentication Plugin I can get my wiki user's details filled with
this information.
If I subscribe an article this will give my nickname
My user-page would be "AK123456"
Links in page history and changes would also be formatted as "AK123456".

I think it would be better if links to users would be formatted as RealName or
NickName. This way it's easier to find out who made the change.

This patch to includes/Linker.php does this:

  • 761,767 ****
    • @private */ function userLink( $userId, $userText ) {

! $encName = htmlspecialchars( User::whoIsReal($userId) );

if( $userId == 0 ) {
        $contribsPage = Title::makeTitle( NS_SPECIAL,

'Contributions' );

return $this->makeKnownLinkObj( $contribsPage,
  • 761,767 ----
    • @private */ function userLink( $userId, $userText ) {

! $encName = htmlspecialchars( $userText );

if( $userId == 0 ) {
        $contribsPage = Title::makeTitle( NS_SPECIAL,

'Contributions' );

return $this->makeKnownLinkObj( $contribsPage,

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz8086

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 9:32 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz8086.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).
  • Bug 8843 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

jason.lunghusen wrote:

I'm the author of bug 8843 (sorry about the dupe, I searched I swear!)and I'd
like to register my support for this enhancement of Mediawiki. With corporate
and educational use, where as the above author mentioned logins are often
staff/student numbers, it would be a positive change.

  • Bug 23294 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

ahmed.sorour wrote:

Any hacks or guidance on how to implement this change in v1.16+? Linker.php has obviously changed significantly since 2006.

olivier.beaton wrote:

Just want to poke my head in here, from what I can tell userLink support is not universal so an audit may be needed first.

I also administer a corporate wiki (which is going to integrate auth into AD) and proper real names display would be a great, people already use their corp account names on the wiki and it's just unintelligible.

In the meantime, since Extension:ShowRealUsername just doesn't cut it I've gone ahead and coded an extension which should replace Usernames into realnames EVERYWHERE in a wiki (that I know of, so far).

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Realnames

So if you found this bug as an administrator, this extension may help you out until proper support comes.

Please note that currently (0.1.1) I have some performance questions about RecentChanges and History pages, I just don't have a big enough wiki to see if there is noticeable slowdowns there, if you do get some using my extension, please let me know, I have some solutions I can release to address that.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:01 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.