Last modified: 2006-06-20 23:45:00 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!
This isn't the place to publish hacks for MediaWiki. Please create a new page on Meta or MediaWiki.org.
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.