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Make logins not be case sensitive
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Description

Author: fines

Description:
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!


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz5550

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 9:11 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz5550.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

robchur wrote:

This isn't the place to publish hacks for MediaWiki. Please create a new page on Meta
or MediaWiki.org.

ayg wrote:

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.