Feedback on TWiki Registration Pages

Please leave feedback here on TWikiRegistration and TWikiRegistrationPub

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Jul 2004

I just read about Twiki in the paper and am just going to try to figure out how to make it work. My goal is to set up a system at the office.

The problem I am not an Alpha Geek, so I am hoping I can figure out how to get this to work.

I've noticed some information, but when I've clicked on the "hyperlinks" they don't seem to bring me to an area I expected. i.e. an area with more information.

I would also like to see examples of pages others have done.

-- GeorgeEdwards - 29 Jul 2004

WelcomeGuest gives you an overview of how TWiki works.

If you need help to setup TWiki at your organization ask someone with technical experience on webservers. You could also ask one of the ConsultantsForHire.

Visit the Sandbox web to see how other people do their first steps in TWiki. Feel free to create there some pages.

To see how developers work collaboratively visit the Codev web, the collaboration space of the TWiki community.

-- PeterThoeny - 30 Jul 2004

There is a problem with the guest account. Any user can change the password of the guest account. Guest user should not be able to chage the password.

-- VincenzoDiMassa - 01 Feb 2005

We are aware of the problem, see DenyPasswordChangeForTWikiGuest. Someone changed the TWikiGuest password, I just restored it.

-- PeterThoeny - 30 Jul 2004

I registered yesterday; no problems but haven't yet received the confirming email. Thought you'd want to know.

-- MarvSmoak - 29 Mar 2005

E-mail confirmation is currently out of order. TWiki.org is currently hosted on SourceForge where outgoing e-mail originating from the web servers is blocked. Sample e-mail for reference:

  Subject:  TWiki - Registration for JohnSmith
     Date:  Mon, 15 Nov 2004 10:34:13 +0100
     From:  peter.thoeny@attglobal.net
       To:  (user at domain)
This is an automated email notification of user registration in TWiki.
Thank you for registering in the TWiki collaboration tool. Please 
save this email for future reference. Your personal TWiki topic is at
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/Main/JohnSmith
   * WikiName: JohnSmith
   * Name: John Smith
   * E-mail: (user at domain)
   * Company name: 
   * Company URL: 
   * Country: 
   * City: 
   * Hear from: 
   * Comments: 
Note:
In case you got this email by mistake: Somebody (John Smith)
registered  at the TWiki site using your mail address 
(user at domain). Contact peter.thoeny@attglobal.net if needed.

-- PeterThoeny - 30 Mar 2005

Hi,

I separated script in the field of the TWikiRegistration for an independent topic that could better be worked and reused in TWiki Applications. See the TWiki.Sandbox.ScriptMakeWikiWord.

Peter, can you put it in the TWikiRegistration like i write in the TWiki.Sandbox.ScriptMakeWikiWord explanation?

See it working hire: gnosislivre.org/.../TWiki/TWikiRegistration - gnosislivre.org/.../TWiki/Sandbox.ScriptMakeWikiWord

-- AurelioAHeckert - 14 Apr 2005

Hello!

can I delete my login?

-- AlexandraBolliger - 30 Jun 2005

Alexandra, I removed your account. Thanks you for trying out TWiki on TWiki.org.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Jul 2005

Like Alexandra, I have tried the Twiki and want my login removed.

Time to try it out for real!

-- MarcoDT - 18 Jul 2005

Thanks for using TWiki. I removed you account as requested.

-- PeterThoeny - 21 Jul 2005

Where a entry the password ???

-- MarcosLi - 06 Sep 2005

Once registered, edit any page and TWiki will ask for your username and password. If needed you can ChangePasswords and ResetPasswords.

-- PeterThoeny - 06 Sep 2005

Estou tentando descobrir como funcionam os plugins. Se alguém tiver algo a acrescentar sobre este assunto, eu agradeceria se deixasse algum comentário.

-- BarbaraAvila - 11 Oct 2005

I wanna know more about plugins. If somebody knows something, please leave a information here. Thank you.

-- BarbaraAvila - 11 Oct 2005

See TWikiPlugins and PluginPackages

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Oct 2005

I would like to change the email address associated with my username. I have looked but found no way to do this. If there is a way, it should be easier to find. If there is not a way, there absolutely should be. Thanks.

-- SteveDavison - 24 Dec 2005

TWiki is a wiki, please edit your TWiki.org home page to change your e-mail address.

-- PeterThoeny - 24 Dec 2005

Hi, I would like to change the word "Country" in user information to something like "Region". I am working with people who must be sensitive about this. Is there an easy way to do this? I do not mind limitted hacking of perl. Thanks in advance.

-- ChrisJillings - 28 Feb 2006

Hi, After setting up TWiki we renamed Main web to CE. After this whenever someone tries to register using the registration page, it redirects them to twiki/bin/register/CE/WebHome which the server cannot find. Is there a way out???

-- SwaroopnathChadaga - 03 Aug 2006

Did you set the {UsersWebName} in configure (the last setting under Store settings )?

-- LynnwoodBrown - 03 Aug 2006

Yes. {UsersWebName} in configure is set to 'CE'. Without that, everything in the TWiki points to Main.

-- SwaroopnathChadaga - 03 Aug 2006

Please ask support questions in the Support web. This topic is about the documentation of the TWikiRegistration topic.

-- PeterThoeny - 04 Aug 2006

Should this documentation for TWikiRegistration discuss ways of limiting the registration? I got wikispammed and would like to moderate the registration process and am considering limiting the register script to only a few .htaccess users. Are there better ways?

-- DavidForrest - 01 Nov 2006

No, spam fight is out of scope of this doc. Please read WikiSpam, and ask specific questions in the Support web.

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Nov 2006

Hi. I've just registered, and thought that in the comments guiding this process, where you put your WikiName, there could be advice/suggestions on what to do when your name has been previously taken as a WikiName. Because: Cyberbob may be a cool one, but perhaps it's one of the many John Smiths out there that found his name had already been 'WikiNamed' and had to use his totally awesome imagination...! This could reduce the wacky-WikiName entries.

-- MatiasKalwill - 25 Nov 2006

Thanks Matias for the suggestion, I added a note accordingly.

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Nov 2006

From the users point of view (or at least my point of view ) the TWikiRegistration topic is a complete usability nightmare. Why?

Because:

• I have to read at least 20 lines of ugly formatted text.
• If I'm new to TWiki I don't know and care what...
  • a DistributionDocument is.
  • "That the information provided in this form will be stored in a database"
  • That "There are good reasons not to spam TWiki.org"
  • ... and so on
• If I have a 1024x768 screen resolution all I see ist text (and this is not what I expect to see if I click on a "register" link.)
• There are 3 boxes with colored background plus at least 5 " notes: " and lots of bold text screaming for attention.
  • What was my task again?

Please don't get me wrong but If I just want to create an account the TWikiRegistration topic tells me:

"wait it's not that easy"

And I'm a bit scared of what might follow if the registration page is already that overloaded.

Basically a registration is just about filling out a couple of form fields. Why making it harder than necessary by providing way to many information (even for the experienced user)? People don't read!

Why not simply have an registration form with the three or four most important info on top? ...and use one line notes which link to more detailed information for the remaining stuff.

Cheers,

-- CarloSchulz - 26 Feb 2007

Carlos, thank you for the candid feedback. Very well put. We need voices like yours. Would you like to get involved and help us out in making TWiki more usable and inviting? Please ReadmeFirst, it contains important info get get started with the TWikiCommunity. In the mean time I took your advise and moved some text to the bottom so that the registration form is now visible "above the fold." Please feel free to do more refactoring work. The green banner is needed to distinguish topics we ship with the distribution from other (supplemental & historical) documents.

-- PeterThoeny - 28 Feb 2007

Sweet. Looks much better now. Unfortunately I couldn't refactor TWikiRegistration by myself because "Access check on TWikiRegistration failed. Action "change": access not allowed on topic."

I already tried to get a bit involved and had a look at UsabilityIdeas but the topic is completly outdated and I was not sure whether the usability efforts where dead or have gone elsewhere (the bugs web?)...

-- CarloSchulz - 28 Feb 2007

Ah, yes. I changed the access control of the TWikiRegistration topic to the TWikiCommunityGroup and added you to that group. Please review that topic and use the rename/move/delete privilege responsibly. Remember that this is just the twiki.org registration form. Changes also need to be checked into svn (and tracked in a bugs item) to make it into the distribution.

We need help in usability. As you pointed out, the UsabilityIdeas is outdated. We appreciate your initative!

-- PeterThoeny - 28 Feb 2007

Hello, Is there a way to configure the registration process to place new registered users into a particular group?

-- AndrewMoore - 12 Apr 2007

Hi Peter. Firstly thanks for all your efforts on Twiki. I am just looking at using Twiki for maintaining online project documentation to be made available on the Internet with some user editable pages. Whilst I respect your open approach (which allows everyone to edit everything and then relies on the community deleting 'bad' entries) I suspect our user community will be much smaller than the spammers community. I've worked on Internet for many many years, and written my own registration systems in PERL. Good intentions are fine, but IMHO you do need some "speedbump" entry limits to discourage spammers. So here are three suggestions:

1) rather than just allowing or disallowing registration, the system should allow filtering 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' email addresses; via a regexp regular expression. We know who our customers are. They may have 35000 employees each, but there are only a handful of companies. So we would like to facilitate inter-company cooperation between our customers and their suppliers, and yet limit registration to e.g. users at bigcorp1.com, engineering at bigcorpsupplier1.com & users at megacorp2.nl plus support at megacorp2supplier1.de

This is where traditional corporate intranet/internet systems typically fail. Internet is generally publish only. Intranet is one company only. And yet competitors want to cooperate on certain areas whilst directly competing on others. A Twiki with simple access rights based on your current scheme could score here: but the registration is not yet up to the job.

We need some sort of ability on the registration page like

   Set ALLOWWEBREGISTRATION = /.*@nicecompany.net^/,

   Set DENYWEBREGISTRATION = /.*@nastycompany.net^/

2) I support the question from AndrewMoore. It is incredibly handy to have auto-generating user groups based on email patterns. e.g. main.megacorpusers = main.twikiusers.emails=~ /@megacorp2.nl^/;

This reduces admin effort for maintaining groups enormously. We dont want/need hugely complex access rights like an ACL based file system, but equally "allow all" is just one step too far for us. Less than half a dozen groups and basic view and change access per group is easily enough for us, but we need to be able to get the users into those groups automatically.

We need some sort of ability on the nicecompanygroup page like

automember email pattern (regular expression) =~/.*@nicecompany.net^/

automember list (auto-generated do not edit): User1, User45, User22 (possibly although this may get too long)

Set group = main.nicecompanygroup

3) To prevent robots, allow the option of inserting a captcha image on the registration page.

Bugzilla already does 1&2, so if you want to snarf some code..... our in-house system does 1,2 & 3. Or if you point me to the PERL maybe I could look into how this could work myself. Or I could share some of my PERL with you.

An alternative would of course be to route approval of registration requests to the TWikiAdminGroup, but that kinda reduces usability further.

-- RayHunter - 14 Apr 2008

Thanks Ray for the feedback.

1. Sensible enhancement. Please file a TWikiFeatureProposals (best if you could commit to implement the feature)
2. Looks interesting. Might be a security issue to base groups on the registered e-mail address, not sure. You could submit a feature request too.
3. See CaptchaPlugin

-- PeterThoeny - 14 Apr 2008

People's names are very personal, and some of us get grumpy when software insists we alter our name to match its view of the universe. Since twikinames have to be twikiwords, I see that you probably can't fix the restriction on name characters (particularly the hyphen); but you could fix the text on the default registration page to make clear what the constraints are, and you could avoid insisting that we use our real names and then rejecting our real names when we enter them. Given the constraints on spaces and hyphens and probably apostrophes, some of us will NOT be using our real names. Also, the error message could be a lot more specific about what's wrong; in particular it could list exactly what characters were allowed. You might also mention that the constraints are so that user names are always twikiwords and hence always get linked.

-- DavidDyerBennet - 06 May 2008

RayHunter, I'm pretty sure you want your regexps to end with "$" rather than "^" -- you want to anchor to the end of the input string, right? Not important since they're just examples for a proposed feature discussion, but better to get things fixed early before they're so ingrained in your head it's hard to figure out what's wrong.

-- DavidDyerBennet - 06 May 2008

I have understand the use of Twiki .Now I want to install in my linux , how can i install ? Please tell me the easy way to install .

-- DhanushKodi - 29 Jul 2008

I think that we should have a privacy statement on the TWiki registration page, indicating that the e-mails in the database will not be shared with other entities for any purpose.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 03 Sep 2008