How to manage new Salsa accounts with the new wiki (was Re: Are we about to DDOS the Salsa signup flow?)
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The current Debian Wiki uses its own account system, but we're planning
to switch to MediaWiki in the coming months. The plan is to use Salsa
for authentication in the new wiki, which could cause a spike in sign-ups.
The people most likely to sign up will be wiki users who noticed something
that broke during the migration, who will be keen to fix it quickly.
Wiki users can reasonably be assumed to be humans, so can we give them
an easy way to get a Salsa account? The example below suggests e-mailing
them each a unique code to get an account without manual review,
but any similar process would be fine.
To be clear, we're still in the early planning stages, so the spike won't
happen any time soon. But also there's no downside in starting to e-mail
users now - the worst case scenario is that they get a redundant account.
On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 11:50:59AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 11:47:25AM +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote:
> >Assuming we have a specific day that we switch to the new wiki, most users
> >without a Salsa account will procrastinate making one until the day,
> >then all sign up at once and be mad at having to wait while the Salsa folks
> >get through the backlog.
> >
> >Can we work with the Salsa people to e-mail every wiki account that doesn't
> >have a matching Salsa account, with a message like when you subscribe to an ML?
> >I.e. give them a unique code, and use the code to verify them automatically.
>
> That's a good thought, yeah. Mail the Salsa admins and ask what they think?
>
> --
> Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
> "We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could
> ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs." -- Mike Andrews
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