Brion Vibber wrote:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
Hi there...Sheldon Rampton here, at Disinfopedia.
After some
irritating and time-consuming encounters with trolls, we have decided
that we want to be able to require contributors to register and to
provide a confirmed email address when they do so.
It would separately be nice to require that an e-mail address _if given_
be confirmed, even where having an address is not itself required. (The
main concern here being the possibility of using wiki accounts to send
interuser e-mail with false return addresses.)
Reconfirmation would need to be required when the user changes the
address stored in their preferences; this leads to the possibility of
storing 'confirmed' and 'new' e-mail addresses to tide over the time
between changing and confirming.
(It *is* necessary to allow people to change their addresses. In the
real world, people gain and lose e-mail access at various institutions
over the course of their online lives.)
The address-required mode that Sheldon would like could then basically
require that the confirmed address be set in order to allow login.
For upwards compatibility on upgrading existing wikis, I'd recommend
using user_email for the 'unconfirmed' address and adding something like
'user_confirmed_email' for the confirmed one; thus users would be given
the opportunity to confirm their e-mail address when they next visit.
(But not doing so would not disable their accounts. Might show a message
up top akin to the 'new messages' notification.)
I started writing a feature which did exactly that. An extra email field
in the user table, Special:Userlogin modifications to allow email
confirmation, even IIRC a modification to Article.php and User.php to
inform users that they can't post because they haven't confirmed. My
intention was to use this feature to allow Halifax residents to
contribute to Wikipedia if they have a confirmed email address, hence I
also made some changes to ipblocks to allow email confirmation to be
switched on and off depending on IP address. I got maybe 60% of the way
through it before deciding that it wasn't such an important feature for
Wikipedia, and I shelved it. I'll see if I can dig up and post what
I've done.
-- Tim Starling