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Re: How to manage new Salsa accounts with the new wiki (was Re: Are we about to DDOS the Salsa signup flow?)



On 7/29/25 6:31 PM, Alexander Wirt wrote:
Am Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 01:32:48PM +0100 schrieb Andrew Sayers:
Note: message is To salsa-admins, Cc debian-wiki for discussion.
Please ensure replies are sent to both addresses.

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.

To be honest, I don't think that this is a good idea to move such an
amount of users without prior consent. Given the age of the platform
there are probably a lot of:

- old and inactive users
- spammy users
- users already on salsa, but with a different username / email

Adding those users will circumvent all antispam method and will probably
wake up a lot of inactive users (please delete my account!) and will led
to a lot of noise and/or supporttickets.

So from my side this is a clear no for just importing those users.

Alex

I'm also very skeptical on how the 2 user bases will be reconciled. There's no good solution to do so.

Also, because we do it for Salsa, I'm understanding the pain on new user account moderation. But we (Salsa admins) haven't signed-up for moderating the wiki as well. If we were to grow the team doing such work, I would have another opinion.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)


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