There is a % of users out there that haven't been able to sort out their Wikimiedia SUL because of username conflicts across wikis. @poke was lucky of having a wikitech.w.o account (and even knowing what that is), so he could get his account anyway. However, there is a risk of having non-tech editors not being able to log in with SUL and being licitly kind of scared by the "LDAP, Labs, Gerrit, Wkitech" thing.

How can we help @poke and the other wikimedians to come?

You should probably talk to Dan Garry as he's running SULF, not me (but he's apparently not on Phabricator yet).

@Jdforrester-WMF ok, I will poke Dan, thank you.

Heads up to @Jalexander , because this might have an impact in Legalpad . Namely, what happens if one of "their" contributors runs into this situation? I guess SUL is a requirement for signing documents (with or without Phabricator), otherwise you could have the same "UsernameXYZ" owned by two different people in two different wikis. If LCA has a process to unify the problematic accounts, maybe we could tag along.

I don’t know when the SUL finalization is supposed to happen (couldn’t find any up-to-date ETA) but until it happens, non-developers will essentially have no way of getting into Phabricator. Since the Bugzilla merge is supposed to happen this month, that means that those users will have no way of contributing to bug reports until the SUL problems have been resolved and they are able to get a global account. I’m not sure if that is really acceptable for the Phabricator launch.

SUL Finalization is happening... but I don't know exact dates. However, is waiting for this finalization the only solution possible? Can't you get your username fixed by the stewards in the meantime?

Also, well, you don't need to be a developer to have a wikitech account. This can also be an interim solution: get your wikitech account, create your Phabricator account with it, and then claim your Wikimedia SUL identity when you have that side sorted out.

Clearly, we cannot commit on enabling Wikimedia login in Phabricator for non-SUL users. That would be a massive, pointless project (if you consider that we are talking about local usernames in hundreds of wikis).

Yes, I’m working on having the stewards resolve my own problem. But that only applies to me. I fear that others in a similar situation as me, but without knowledge about the developer account system, will be a bit lost when they try to sign up for Phabricator. I mean, the “LDAP Username/Password” prompt is quite intimidating, whereas the nice “Login with MediaWiki” button seems a lot simpler. But then users without a global account just get such an error:

To use Connected Apps on this site, you must have an account across all projects. When you have an account on all projects, you can try to connect "phabricator-production" again.

So if the SUL finalization happens after the Bugzilla merge (which is the case I assume) then it’s probably a good idea to make this a bit easier to understand.

Unfortunately, I still don’t have a solution for my problem. I tried to acquire the global account by requesting a username change but it got declined because one other user has an “overarching claim” on the name. I tried to contact that user (who has been mostly inactive since 2012) via email, but didn’t hear anything back. As far as I am aware, the person who has the “highest” user rights and highest edit count gets the name, but is the status as a core developer not relevant too? Can you do anything about it, so I can keep the name I have almost everywhere else?

If this is about having the same Phabricator username as your Wikimedia username, and if such username is still available in Phabricator, I believe admins can rename your username. Please ask @Aklapper (andre__ on IRC wikimedia-devtools).

I do have the name I want on Phabricator and on Gerrit/dev too, and I do own it on MediaWiki.org too, but I won’t get the unified Wikimedia name.

Well, then there is nothing we can do here in the Phabricator project for you. We have absolutely nothing to do with SUL dispute resolutions...