Topic on Project:Support desk

Hi there!

So, I essentially imported an entire wiki, in the process of the wiki changing hosts to a new website.

The imports all went fine, for the most part.

But, I clicked "Assign edits to local users where the named user exists locally". And, apparently, if there's not a currently registered user by that name, Mediawiki appends the Interwiki prefix to their username.

For example, there's thousands of edits on the previous wiki by a fella who goes by "Robbastard". But, his name is shown as "cf>Robbastard" in all of the page histories (where "cf" is the Interwiki Prefix I assigned for importing from "Canonfire" wiki), and Mediawiki treats it as a non-registered username. Now, of course, Robbastard has registered on the new version of the wiki, and I want to change the attributions to properly credit him on the new wiki.

I've tried Extension:UserMerge to try to delete the "cf>Robbastard" non-registered attributions and change them to "Robbastard", to no avail. I know there's Extension:ChangeAuthor, but, that would mean hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands of attributions to change one at a time.

I'm hoping there's a way to fix this, and avoid it in the future.

If I tried re-importing all of the pages again (which would do horrible things to the activity log, I'm sure, and "overwrote" the existing ones, is there a combination of things to click/not-click or enter/not enter to make the Interwiki Prefix not append to a user's name where no registered user exists?

Or is it always going to append the Interwiki Prefix?

Why don't you backup your database and restore it on the new host? That would prevent losing all user accounts and hidden data (like deleted pages, etc)

So, the key here is that I imported the wiki. I'm not the person who owned the old wiki.

I used "Special:Export" and "Special:Import" because I had some privileges on it. But, I don't have access to the original database. Ergo, members must make a new account if they come to the new site from the older one, where the wiki was unsafe and had hundreds of spammers who'd made thousands of spam pages.

In importing, I still have the page histories with attributions to the user names. I just want to be able to associate the names without MediaWiki automatically appending Interwiki Prefixes.

Ok, understood.

There's no simple way to fix this. As the option says, Assign edits to local users where the named user exists locally. This of course isn't true when you import the contents on a new wiki where no old user is registered. The only way this could work is if you populate the user table before importing the data. However, that would prevent users from registering/logging-in with their old username, because the username would be taken already and they won't have the password (an exception to this would be if you also install Extension:StubUserWikiAuth).