Feature Proposal: Force users to register

Motivation

Many intranet TWiki sites have their users already registered by some external mechanism. (i.e. the $ENV{REMOTE_USER} is set.). However this leaves the problem that it is the login name (which is typically a nonsense corporate id) rather than something people can recognise which is displayed throughout the wiki. For this reason we want users to be forced to register if they are not already registered. This is all about creating buy-in on the TWiki in the typical corporate intranet scenario.

Description and Documentation

If no registration exist TWiki uses the user's login name as his WikiName too.

Forcing registration will give us a nice WikiName which should be a good substitute for this user's real name. As an added benefit we can also collect the user's e-mail address which may also come in handy.

Examples

Impact

Implementation

The forced registration should be an optional feature set in configure.

It should come into play when users

1. hit edit - or
2. hit attach - or
3. try to view an access restricted topic.

I'm not really sure if (3) is needed. In my current TWiki my access control lists are defined on the basis of login names (not WikiNames) and the access control seem to work ust find even after the user has registered himself and thereby created a WikiName.

An elegant implementation would mean that user after registration would be redirected to the page his was to trying to access/edit/attach to. In my opinion this is nice-to-have functionality.

A lot has already been discussed and even developed on this topic:

• This feature request is a direct result of the support question raised in AuthenticationAndCorporateAdoption.

• HaraldJoerg has created the RegistrationOnDemandHack which is unfortunately unsupported and seems to break with every new minor release of TWiki. (not because of Harald's hack which is as elegant as can be but because the parts of the core TWiki code that has been hacked have not been stable during the past releases).

• PeterThoeny has created RedirectRegisterPlugin but is not (yet?) able to release it since it was made for a client.

Note: This request is in the same family as the attempts made to auto-populate TWiki's users database with LDAP data or similar. This is another way of solving the same problem, but has more complexity in it and can only be used on sites that allow this information from the corporate user registry. The forced registration is a far simpler solution. The auto-populate is of course elegant because we never need to ask the TWiki user any questions whatsoever. With the forced registration we need to ask for the information. However - asking the user (once in his lifetime) to create a WikiName and perhaps give his e-mail address is acceptable to any corporate user, I think.

-- Contributors: LarsBruunxHansen - 09 Jul 2007

Discussion