Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Labs/Authentication improvement project

Compare https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Main+Page&type=signup

with https://github.com/signup/free

Already the URL is more scary! But most important:

In that stage, do we really need...

• The huge disclaimer.
• Your domain.
• Instance shell.

If I understand correctly the page, these fields refer to the shell creation. But what is the percentage of new users that will need that? (And Hadoop in the future?) Can we have an additional, optional step for them? In exchange the (presumable) majority of Wiki&Gerrit-only users will have a much simpler and welcoming page.

Also, does it make sense to ask for optional email address when Git/Gerrit make only sense with an email address? Why not making it required?

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

It's possible to simplify the url to: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup

I use the url: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup&returnto=Help:Getting+Started

^^ I use that so that when the user finishes getting an account created, they are sent to the Getting Started documentation. What we can have is a short url that redirects to the longer, more helpful url. How's https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/signup ?

I'd like to shorten the disclaimer. I need to talk with legal about that.

We can eliminate the domain with CSS. I'll modify the site CSS for that today.

It's not possible to remove shell account name. That's needed for both Labs and Gerrit.

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/signup looks very good.

About the disclaimer, yes I wonder who reads all that. There are critical points that any user needs to be aware about, but they can be explain like a CC deed. If the long text can't be avoided, a way to deal with long disclaimers is to place them more at the bottom instead of upfront, and then add a checkbox "Yes, I have read and accept etc etc".

PS: my only reason to insist on this are the complaints about the "complex registration" compared to GitHub. I might be wrong but I think essentially both registration processes are simple. But GitHub's looks simple, and even fancy.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

MediaWiki's signup pages suck. It's hard to get around that without changing mediawiki. There's already some effort going on for that, though.

Oh, btw, I've requested a simplified text to display from legal.