Wiki talk:OSM AuthPlugin

Interesting!

I'll be watching this closely.

Have you thought about a solution to username conflicts?

-- Firefishy 11:33, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

For the short term, if the same username exists in both systems with different passwords, the owner of the wiki account will be able to log in, as there is the option to fall back on the existing MW logins if the external login fails. I believe there is a MW extension for doing username changes, and while this will be a simple matter for people with different login names for OSM and MW, it will have to be resolved carefully and manually in cases where the same name is used by different people. Chriscf 11:53, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah interesting! Reading AuthPlugin.php, are you suggesting we code this plugin initially to "transparently create internal wiki accounts the first time someone logs in who can be authenticated externally" (against OSM central account) ?

That's certainly solving the main problem, allowing new people onto the wiki without having to (knowingly) create another account.

Existing users with matching user names on both systems, will remain with separate passwords I guess.

For all those awkward people who use a different username on the two systems, I'm trying to imagine what it'll do. Maybe when their wiki cookie expires, it will pick up on their OSM account cookie instead, and then forcibly create a fresh new wiki account for them, with their OSM username. Not necessarily a major problem. These people could then request to have their editing history moved over to their new account (which I think is reasonably easy using some plugin).

We could also then disallow direct creation of a wiki accounts... Except that there's the really awkward people whose username is taken by somebody else on the wiki. Probably not very many of these.

I suppose eventually we want clear things up so that we "require that all accounts authenticate externally".

-- Harry Wood 11:49, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

In the spirit of repeating everything the last person has said, I welcome your contribution.  :-) For the true collisions involving two different people, there is this extension. The offending wiki account can be renamed to match that person's OSM account. This is also an option for people who have different names on both system to bring them into line. Of course, this first needs a list of matching names to identify any conflicts. Chriscf 13:31, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Test

Your test works well, although... is it creating the internal wiki account using the email address as the user name, when people login by email address? -- Harry Wood 14:49, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

It will accept any login that the OSM API accepts, and consequently will create two accounts if people use both account name and email address to log in. The only way to avoid this would be for the OSM API to accept one and only one canonical login name. I believe that other parts of MediaWiki (including any third-party extensions that require it) expect authenticate() to return a boolean, so I'm somewhat hesitant to break this expectation. Chriscf 15:45, 29 September 2008 (UTC)