User talk:Trlkly

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Revision as of 09:58, 10 September 2008

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License and Registration

The reason why you were getting the "User account "trlkly" is not registered. Please check if you want to create/edit this page." note is because the pages you were editing began with a lowercase letter, which is treated as a separate account by the software (and is not supported to begin with such). Your userspace and sig are located at User:Trlkly and User:Trlkly/sig, with the capital T. So that's why that happened. I've moved them to their appropriate, capitalised locations. Thanks for understanding. --DorianGray 08:25, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Well I think your gratitude is a bit premature, as I don't quite understand.

trlkly isn't supposed to have a capital T. It's my name; I should be able to spell it the way I want. I didn't register it that way, and the software won't let me reregister under the proper name. There is no reason for it not to be supported, as every other wiki I've been on that uses MediaWiki lets me use the lowercase letter. So my complaint still stands.

IOW, If the software won't let me register under the proper name, why can't I at least use the proper user page? ^(The)trlkly 08:43, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

The software probably automatically capitalised the T for you. --DorianGray 09:16, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki usually requires that the first letter of every page (and, by extension, every user) start with a capital letter... just try it on Wikipedia, going to page will take you Page. Now, there is a configuration option to turn that off, and we've done so here (so we can have email pages starting with lowercase letters), and back in the day, that used to let you have usernames with lowercase letters too... but as of an upgrade that we did in late 2005, that's no longer the case (something in MediaWiki changed, and usernames starting with lowercase letters are no longer valid). To fix this would mean pouring over the MediaWiki code and trying to find every place that the lowercase usernames could cause problems, and changing them... which'd add yet another potential problem if the change isn't perfect, and add yet another annoyance to work around every time we need to upgrade (because every time we upgrade, we'd have to "fix" it again). This is something we want to avoid whenever possible, and having usernames start with lowercase letters isn't worth the effort it would take.

As for having a user page with the lowercase letter – that is possible, because of the option I mentioned to turn off the capitalisation of page names... but it'd have its own set of problems, most of which stem from the fact that it wouldn't be your userpage, since it'd have a different name. For instance, anyone who clicked your name in a Recent Changes listing or a History page, or similar, would get sent to the page with the capital T. If someone edited the User_talk page with the lowercase t, you wouldn't get the "You have new messages" notice, or an email (if you have that turned on). A lot of convenience links (like the "view this user's contributions" link) wouldn't show up on your user page. Little things, but they add up to a bad idea.

Out of curiosity, why is the lowercase first letter important to you?

You can still have it in lowercase in your sig... I mean, I do. --phlip ^T_C 09:58, 10 September 2008 (UTC)