Unique Identifier

[bgotink]

Right now, the name is used as ID. This means that two people with the same name will have the same account. Use the university ID as identification, but perhaps continue using the real name as shown name? To do this, we need to disallow editing the signature and real name.

[bgotink]

For the record: this is a real problem, as the current VTK webserver has 40 duplicate names (after removing stubs and phonies).

[krmarien]

Is it possible to disable editing the account? We can just update the user data at every login and take the latest info from the website?

[pmaene]

Isn't this fixed since we started using the university identification as the user ID, combined with the Realnames extension?

[bgotink]

Yes, this has been fixed by switching to the userid.

The username cannot be changed (at least not without an extension), so we're safe on that end. Users can still edit their real names though.

If you want to disable this, there are a couple of options:

• find a way to truly disable this in an extension
• edit the MediaWiki php files to disable this
• reset the real name on every login

The second option has the disadvantage that updating to a new version of mediawiki becomes a lot harder. The third option has the disadvantage of not really disabling changing the name, which doesn't quite fix anything.

[krmarien]

So the first option is the best, but it is hard to implement. I suggest we take the third?