On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 5:16 PM, Ralph Angenendt <ralph.angenendt at gmail.com> wrote: > - Glue > > At the moment we have different user databases for everything except > website and forums. This has to change. As far as we've found out, every > piece of software we use at the moment can be coaxed to authenticate > against an LDAP database. We want to order those accounts by email (make > that the primary key, as it has to be unique) and try to merge them into > one large database. Logging in will still be done on username / password > or on the wiki with WikiName / password, where your WikiName will be one > of the attributes your account has in the LDAP backend. Dear Lord, yes, that makes sense. > This has some issues: We will invariably have lots of doubled accounts, > as people might have subscribed to the website with a different mail > address than to the wiki. We will need to weed out spammer acocunts, > something which probably will not be easy. Also, people like me might say something different from a work email account than from a personal account. I worry about using the email address as the key, because it makes it very difficult to *preserve* a user's history across address changes. I like my GMail account, but I've had old Comcast or university accounts from which I submitted bugs to RHEL years ago. If I'm not mistaken, index management by numerical keys can often be significantly faster than by text keys.