Topic on Project:Support desk

User account is not registered

5
Cmjohannes (talkcontribs)

I am having some issues with a particular user. This user happens to be userid=1 in the database. The user's name is Dk_barons. When he tries to register he gets an error stating that username is not registered. If I manually change the username to Dkbarons in the database, he can login. But that is obviously not a solution. I am not aware of any other users having problems logging in.

I can find the username in the Special:ListUsers and he shows up on revision lists for edits he has made. Going to User:Dk_barons results in User account Dk_barons is not registered.

This wiki used to run ipbwiki bridge extension. The extension has been commented out in LocalSettings.php; however, ipbwiki tables remain in the database because I have not read of a good way to uninstall the ipbwiki extension, which heavily modified the database tables.
Mediawiki current version: 1.23.3 (recently updated from 1.16).

88.130.108.129 (talkcontribs)

Hi!

The ipbwiki bridge extension has created usernames, which are invalid. Usernames inside the database are not allowed to contain underscores; spaces however are allowed and MediaWiki should then treat them as underscores (e.g. in URLs). The account might work (again), when you change its name inside the DB to "Dk barons".

Cmjohannes (talkcontribs)

I manually replaced the underscore with a space in the database and the user was able to login. Also the user's namespace and contributions seem to be appearing correctly.

What other problems should I anticipate having to fix because of the ipbwiki software? Is there a definitive How To guide for "un-F-ing" the database tables?
Thanks for your help

Cmjohannes (talkcontribs)

As I was paging through the user table, it seems that many users are in the table twice ... once seemingly created by the Mediawiki registration and once created as a result of the ipbwiki bridging software. (Example: For user_id=15, user_name=Tw ; For user_id=1531, user_name=TW). This will be a problem. It seems that people made edits under both user_ids.

I have the UserMerge addon installed and it worked merging "TW" into "Tw" but going through one-by-one for about 500 usernames would be too time consuming. Could someone advise a better way to automate this?

88.130.108.129 (talkcontribs)

I would have recommended the UserMerge extension as well. Whether you find something to automate this or not: You will have to create some kind of mapping, which tells you, after which rules accounts should be merged, anyway. Maybe you can automate a part of this operation, e.g. in usernames, you can replace all underscores with spaces. However, for upper- and lowercase differences (like in your "TW" and "Tw"), you will have to tell manually, whether it's the same user or not; I don't think there is a software-way of doing that - after all both of these names are different and valid usernames.

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