Enabling Extension:ConfirmAccount

[Dave Neary]

Hi all,

I just tried to create an account for the oVirt wiki and was kind of 
surprised that to do so I had to contact someone who already had an 
account. It seems like everyone who has an account can add new users, so 
it looks like this is basically a spam avoidance policy. Is that right?

If that's the case, I'd like to suggest enabling the ConfirmAccount 
extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmAccount - which 
can be configured to ask users for a username & email address, and their 
bio/reasons for wanting to have an account. The request is then added to 
a moderation queue, and anyone who is in the Bureaucrat role can approve 
the account creation request.

To the user, this fits within the expected intimacy gradient. I plan on 
blogging about the intimacy gradient which I talked about in my Ignite 
talk at teh Red Hat Summit last week, I'll point people there then - the 
basic idea is that you should not require people to have private 
communications to get access to a semi-public resource like a wiki 
account. In this case, you're making the request via a web page, and 
although the end result is the same (a human checks if you're a human), 
to the user it provides the same level of indirection as a Mailman 
subscription page.

What do you think? Seems like something we could do easily.

Thanks,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards Team, Red Hat
Phone: +33 9 50 71 55 62