Extension talk:Realnames/LQT Archive 1

Speed Issues
There is (I have) some concern over speed issues. While I wasn't able to observe it on my wiki, with large RecentChanges or History pages with a lot of username->realname conversions/lookups (by as many different users as possible) it could start to slow down. We have potentially 500 unique realname lookups for a single page hit. If you experience this on your wiki, please let me know, I have a few strategies to combat this. The first will be to change from using the User:newFromName core lookup and first compiling a list of usernames to look up, and doing them all at once in a single direct db hit on the users table. This would speed up name lookups on all pages but tie us more closely into base core components (I may do this anyways in a future version). The next strategy would be to hook into these two specific high use pages (perhaps All Users as well), and add to their queries so as they get data they also get the real name for display. I've already coded this for History, OldRecentChanges, EnhancedRecentChanges and AllUsers, but haven't included it in yet, it would increase the size/complexity a fair amount. The good news that all of these improvements can act as layers. We can do hook-based lookups for high-use places, than fallback on the more general article content search for any straglers (like Revisions, Comparison, user-created links). Please let me know what your experience is! --Quadir 17:59, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Realname links
If you use the default style 'replace', users (especially non-tech) users won't be able to find someone's username very easily. Infact the only place you can find it is in the URL, under the form 'User:username' because all displays will be of their real names. This makes manual linking to a user cumbersome. I can see two avenues of attack to this problem, the first may be to change the default style to something like 'append' or 'reverse'. Please let me know if you prefer a different default style (although this will affect people already using the extension). The 2nd avenue, and one I will probably pursue anyways is looking at $linker to see if I could allow users to do [User:realname] links in articles. Even if it involves doing another search and replace of realname->username or hooking's the lookup to be username OR realname. This could produce some weird collisions since realnames are not unique, and usernames+realnames definitely aren't, however as a togglable option it may make a 'replace' style wiki more usable in the long. Please let me know your thoughts! --Quadir 18:07, 19 September 2011 (UTC)