User:IMSoP/trashpad
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This is just somewhere to dump some comments that I typed up and then realised were a complete waste of time. It seems a shame to lose them forever, so in case I change my mind again, I'm shoving them in here:
- On a technical note, combining this with my parallel-DB concept (wherever it's been moved to now) you'd need a third (or perhaps 2½th) account type to represent global login with multiple usernames; i.e.:
- True global account: this is what would be created for a new user, and would simply store one central record accessible from all wikis. Hopefully, most 'legacy' accounts would be either automatically or manually merged to form these as well.
- Unmigated 'legacy' account: exists only in a single wiki; the global user database just has a dummy record saying "no user name here, go look at the local database".
- Global account with linked legacy accounts: this would either:
- have 'exceptions' stored in the central DB, so that requests from, say, en_wikipedia, would refer to a specific legacy account, those from fr_wikipedia another, and all others to the centrally located information. (I'm thinking of queries like "who's logged in" here, which would presumably be global_user_id → local_username)
- or, we could look in the individual (per-wiki) user tables first, and override the central DB if the name exists locally. If we delete the information for fully-merged local users as they are migrated, this would be conceptually simpler (it would deal with types 2 and 3 in one go). The disadvantage is that for fully global (type 1) users, and linked global information, it would require an extra DB lookup, which is a bit wasteful
- I don't know if I'm thinking about this a bit too much, given how I have, like, no database experience, but, well, there you go... - IMSoP 18:37, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)
- On a technical note, combining this with my parallel-DB concept (wherever it's been moved to now) you'd need a third (or perhaps 2½th) account type to represent global login with multiple usernames; i.e.:
- There are complications, though - given:
- [wp_en::Foo → global::Foo] & [wp_de::Bar → global::Foo]
- & [wp_jp::Bar → global::Bar] & [wp_fr::Foo → global::Bar]
- a lookup for "who has username Foo" is not trivial.