Question

Is there a way to use an email address as a TWiki login?

I'm fine mapping "sabrams" as my login, and having this map to SamAbrams as my wikiname. But then my users need to keep track of three pieces of information:

• wikiname
• login
• email address

I would much prefer to use sabrams@yahooPLEASENOSPAM.com as my login, cutting down the key information to only two items:

• wikiname
• email address

Among other things, this helps with users forgetting their login, and also with users complaining a wikiname is too idiosyncratic to remember.

Unfortunately, this is the error message I get when attempting to login with an email address, and then trying to save or modify any pages:

"Topic save error

During save of file Sandbox.BeGotten an error was found by the version control system. Please notify your TWiki administrator.

/usr/bin/ci -q -l -m'none' -t-none

-w'sabrams@yahoo.com' /home/twiki/data/Sandbox/BeGotten.txt 2>&1

ci: invalid identifier `sabrams@yahoo.com'

ci aborted"

Environment

-- SamAbrams - 18 Feb 2004

Answer

The @ sign is not a valid character for login names, at least not for RCS. Better tpo use only alphanumeric chars. You could use only the name part of the e-mail address, e.g. sabrams, and let TWiki map from this login name to the WikiName. See "TWiki Username vs. Login Username" in TWikiUserAuthentication.

-- PeterThoeny - 21 Feb 2004

That is impractical. I have worked in places where the login name before the @ is not distinct - for example because two companies merged. Consider MSN Messenger where most IDs are @hotmail.com but actually you can register with any email address you like. If you truncate to the first @ then my address would be assumed to be Martin@HotmailPLEASENOSPAM.com, which is wrong and thus fail.

-- MartinCleaver - 06 Mar 2004

We could however escape all non-allowed characters to map them into acceptable RCS names.

-- MartinCleaver - 29 Sep 2004

LoginNameAliasesPlugin was designed to handle this general sort of problem (as you point out in WikiNamesTooLongForLogIn).

-- ClaussStrauch - 29 Sep 2004

I had the same issue. We provide a customer wiki, and our users log in with their email addresses. I created a LoginEmailPlugin that converts an email address to a WikiWord without special characters.

-- ByronIgoe - 21 Nov 2007