Mailing List Archive

Matias Pelenur wrote:
> A user on my MediaWiki site would like to change their username. Is that
> possible, or better yet, possible and not too hard?
>
> I'm guessing that the value in the user.user_name column for the user would have
> to be changed, and also the title of User page name. Hopefully any other
> references use the userid? Would pages have to be rebuilt?

There's a helper script for this in the maintenance directory:
changeuser.sql.

Set the oldname and newname variables at the top to the old and new
names (use spaces, not underscores!) and run it through the mysql
command-line client or phpmyadmin or whatever you've got to run SQL
scripts into.

It's a little ugly, but it works (has been used on Wikipedia a number of
times.)

I'd recommend backing up your database before running any manual scripts
in case you make a mistake; SQL can be unforgiving!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)