RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

FancySharkette · **01-29-2016, 05:05 AM**

I was hoping to make a character page, but every time I try to log in, it tells me there's no user by this name. What am I doing wrong?

McBeefâ„¢ · **01-29-2016, 06:00 AM**

(01-29-2016, 05:05 AM)Joan_of_Shark Wrote: I was hoping to make a character page, but every time I try to log in, it tells me there's no user by this name. What am I doing wrong?

Ah, so the wiki logon system is broken by names that have non standard characters in it.

So you need to change your logon name to remove the underscores, or you can't log in. I don't know why, but Franz explained it to me. I have to remove the copyright sign from my name or I can't log onto the wiki.

FancySharkette · **01-29-2016, 07:12 AM**

(01-29-2016, 06:00 AM)McBeefÂ© Wrote:
(01-29-2016, 05:05 AM)Joan_of_Shark Wrote: I was hoping to make a character page, but every time I try to log in, it tells me there's no user by this name. What am I doing wrong?
Ah, so the wiki logon system is broken by names that have non standard characters in it.

So you need to change your logon name to remove the underscores, or you can't log in. I don't know why, but Franz explained it to me. I have to remove the copyright sign from my name or I can't log onto the wiki.

Oh!!! wow, thanks so much, it's been driving me nuts!

**Unnamed Mercenary** · **01-29-2016, 08:45 AM**

Mcbeef gave the gist of it. For boring details, there's a fancy plugin that bridges user accounts from the forum to the wiki and updates those wiki accounts with forum account changes. For one reason or another, special characters and underscores are not carries over during the conversion and you end up with an invalid wiki username.

FancySharkette · **01-29-2016, 09:29 AM**

(01-29-2016, 08:45 AM)Unnamed Mercenary Wrote: Mcbeef gave the gist of it. For boring details, there's a fancy plugin that bridges user accounts from the forum to the wiki and updates those wiki accounts with forum account changes. For one reason or another, special characters and underscores are not carries over during the conversion and you end up with an invalid wiki username.

I just finished making it, so I figured it out. Thank for though!

FreelanceWizard · **01-29-2016, 10:06 AM**

Technical stuff, for the interested, follows!

Special characters don't carry over because MediaWiki encodes them differently than MyBB does, so you end up with the usernames not matching up for the purposes of checking passwords. This is a classic "why u no use UTF-8" issue. Tongue

MediaWiki uses a binary store, while MyBB uses UTF-16. The net result is that anything outside of standard ASCII tends to give the plugin heartburn.

Underscores don't work right because, in the MediaWiki world, underscores and spaces are the same thing. MyBB, of course, cares a lot about underscores. The plugin gets called a couple of times during the authentication process and gets both the raw username (whatever you typed in) and the cooked one (with the underscore replaced by a space) at different points. Since there's no way to disambiguate the two, we're left with a curious situation where we'd have to check the MyBB database 2^(number of underscores) times to authenticate, which opens up the potential for a denial of service. Instead, we just punt and say underscores don't work. Smile

FancySharkette · **01-29-2016, 10:12 AM**

(01-29-2016, 10:06 AM)FreelanceWizard Wrote: Technical stuff, for the interested, follows!

Special characters don't carry over because MediaWiki encodes them differently than MyBB does, so you end up with the usernames not matching up for the purposes of checking passwords. This is a classic "why u no use UTF-8" issue. MediaWiki uses a binary store, while MyBB uses UTF-16. The net result is that anything outside of standard ASCII tends to give the plugin heartburn.

Underscores don't work right because, in the MediaWiki world, underscores and spaces are the same thing. MyBB, of course, cares a lot about underscores. The plugin gets called a couple of times during the authentication process and gets both the raw username (whatever you typed in) and the cooked one (with the underscore replaced by a space) at different points. Since there's no way to disambiguate the two, we're left with a curious situation where we'd have to check the MyBB database 2^(number of underscores) times to authenticate, which opens up the potential for a denial of service. Instead, we just punt and say underscores don't work.

I see, I changed tons of things before checking the site. But now the page is up and running. I appreaciate the feedback though!

so, about the wiki..

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes