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Points of discussion before going on-line

8
Hansie (talkcontribs)

Dear Sir,

I installed and configured MediaWiki.

Before going on-line I like to discuss next points.

I am creating New York Wiki for New York City organisations.

Sysop, users and guests are the groups.

The MainPage is blocked.

From DefaultSettings.php I copied line 4141 (@ name user rights) to line 4811 (end of user rights settings)

Permission ['*'] all True Permission ['user'] all True Permission ['bot'] all False Permission ['sysop'] all True Permission ['bureaucrat'] all True

Do you have any comment on this?

Thank you in advance.

hansie

88.130.94.75 (talkcontribs)

If you do not configure group permissions yourself, the default from DefaultSettings.php will be applied automatically - you do not have to copy it. Apart from that, information on how to configure user groups properly are available on page Manual:$wgGroupPermissions.

You will e.g. find that the permissions of multiple groups are cumulative: If a user is member of different groups, then the user will get a right if it is granted to at least one of these groups - even if it is not granted to his other groups. That means you do not have to grant all available rights (like the "block" or the "delete" right) to all users - in fact I think that you might not want to give ordinary users special rights like these.

Only grant special rights to the special groups.

Hansie (talkcontribs)

Thank you for your response.

Which rights should I give ordinary users?

hansie

Hansie (talkcontribs)

Supplementary question:

Which rights should I give to "*"?

88.130.109.101 (talkcontribs)

The group "*" is automatically given to all users. Users, who are not logged in, are in this group (and in this group only). The group "user" is automatically assigned to all users, who are logged in. Since user group permissions are cumulative, these users will then have all permissions of group "*" and additionally those, which are assigned to group "user".

Manual:User_rights#List_of_permissions is a list of all possible rights, which a user group can have. Which of them you want to give to e.g. the group "user", depends on what ordinary users should be able to do. See Manual:$wgGroupPermissions for details on how to assign permissions.

Which rights which group currently has can be seen in your wiki on the page Special:ListGroupRights. The rights, which are assigned by default (meaning without you assigning anything special yourself), already are more or less fine for most wikis.

As an example, if your wiki is publicly accessible and you then assign the group "*" the right to edit pages and to upload files, this will be a guarantee that you get spam en masse: In form of spammy pages and in form of trash uploads. You should better not do that. ;-)

This post was posted by 88.130.109.101, but signed as 88.130.118.211.

Florianschmidtwelzow (talkcontribs)

Please do not edit DefaultSettings.php. This configuration file includes, like the name say, default settings, so, if you update your MediaWiki version, this file will be override normally (and your changes are away). To define user rights and/or user groups, please use the LocalSettings.php and $wgGroupPermissions, like 88.130.94.75 explained. Additionally, you can use Manual:$wgRevokePermissions to revoke a permission for a special group (also, if this right is given by another group the user is a member of).

Hansie (talkcontribs)

Hello Florian,

What do you mean by "88.130.94.75"? It's a German IP address!

Thank you,

hansie

Florianschmidtwelzow (talkcontribs)
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