Manual:$wgAutopromote

Details
This array contains criteria of automatic promotion. The syntax is:

  here may be:


 * A single condition
 * A 1>#Set of conditions|set of conditions

Possible conditions
Possible conditions (defined in ; extensions may add more through the  hook):

Conditions with and without arguments
Each condition can be written in two forms:

Set of conditions
Sets of conditions have the following syntax:

There are 4 operands available:


 * & (AND) — promote if user matches all conditions
 * | (OR) — promote if user matches any condition
 * ^ (XOR) — promote if user matches only one of two conditions
 * ! (NOT) - &mdash; promote if user matches no conditions.

The sets of conditions are evaluated recursively, so you can use nested sets of conditions linked by operands.

Caveats
Autopromotion does not actually add users to a group; MediaWiki will check whether a user meets the conditions for autopromotion whenever it checks the user's rights or effective groups. This means that a user will only appear to be in a group on Special:ListUsers if they were added to it through Special:UserRights.

Since  you can use  instead, which adds users normally to a group, if they match the given criteria and have not been demoted before. Alternatively,  (1>Special:MyLanguage/MediaWiki 1.16|MW 1.16+) might be useful for you.

Example
If you wanted to autopromote each user to captain upon their having both confirmed their email address and either made at least 100 edits or registered their account at least 60 days ago, you would use:

Note that this would get rid of all other autopromote groups; to instead add the captain autopromote group while keeping those autopromote groups that already exist, one would use: