Description

Logging in using caps in username and logging in with all lower case username map to different accounts which is a subtle differentiation that will confuse most users when the accounts dont require passwords because the system is ussing HTTP auth.

Recommend that:

Either usernames should not be case sensitive, or there should be an option to do case insensitive matching when matching the username.

Steps to reproduce

1. turn on HTTP authentication
2. using IIS, restrict access to the website to basic authentication
3. go to the website and login using uppercase in the name
4. click on the username and add content to the users homepage
5. Close the web browser
6. go to the website and login with all lowercase in the username
7. click on the username and notice the homepage is different

Example

Details

Workaround

Discussion

This is not a bug.

Windows users please accept, that lowercase and uppercase characters are really different.

• Unix users, please accept that the average person (who has not been brainwashed by an operating system or programming language into conforming to a case-sensitive frame of mind) does not naturally think of "Word", and "word", and "WORD" as three absolutely distinct entities with no relationship to each other. I speculate that the origins of case-sensitivity were from a run-time library string comparison routine that simply performed a literal character-by-character match, and rather than migrating to a compare that matches human perception, the early computer folks just learned to live with things the way they were. Now there is a set of people who have learned that they have to do everything in a case-sensitive way in order to avoid grief, have internalized this rule, and feel the need to indoctrinate everyone else in "the way it should be". I'm not trying to say that the authors of MoinMoin are not free to choose to make anything as case-sensitive as they wish, but when a user naturally stumbles upon a ridiculous problem that is created by case-sensitivity (or by a mismatch in case-sensitivity between two operating systems), maybe consider that the old standard may be outdated rather than "the user is wrong". Computers have come a long way, and the best applications are ones that conform to human nature, not those that expect users to conform to some standard with no really logical purpose. Remember that the MoinMoin user base includes a huge number of people who just use wikis that have been set up by others, and have no need or desire to understand the details of the Wiki setup. MOST PEOPLE DO NOT THINK IN A CASE-SENSITIVE MANNER. Please think in a user-friendly manner. Thanks for listening.

  Hmm, why does the user has choosen beforehand a case sensitive user name if it is his wish to use it different? -- ReimarBauer 2006-09-18 06:49:25

User names should be wiki names, wiki names should use CamelCase with nothing else than A-Za-z0-9. Stick to this rule, allow no exceptions and you avoid lots of trouble. Works even with German users ;-)) -- RobertSeeger 2006-02-07 18:46:57

Plan

• Priority:
• Assigned to:
• Status:

CategoryMoinMoinNoBug