[Axem]

To expand on this idea (3rd paragraph), I've refined my thoughts about what I think would be best. I think just a page (or an expansion of the user profile page) that a user could modify to their own desires would be best. They could populate it with images and links to ships they've made, or campaign reviews, or best burns given in a general discussion debate. It would be very similar to user pages on the wiki, except its one less step to get and make (unless we can totally integrate the two, but that doesn't sound like a good idea...)

I was looking around at SMF mods that might suit something we might like to see. And I think this Ultimate Profile mod might be worth a look (though the support thread has some hotfixes that need to manually applied). It's too bad the example link doesn't work anymore, but from the general description its about what would be required.

Unless someone knows of something else or knows how to make one from scratch. I'm afraid I'm just an ideas guy with this...

Thoughts and stuff?

[Goober5000]

I like the idea of finding out about a user's contributions through their profile.  Archive.org still has an example of what the theme looks like, although it's missing some of the theme/layout information.  It can be seen here.

The major problem is that as you said, it would be necessary to manually apply all the hotfixes in the support thread.  The mod itself hasn't been updated or maintained since 2011.

It seems to me that the signature + wiki link solution that you arrived at is perfectly serviceable, though.  The signature is visible without a profile click, and the wiki page has the advantage that it can be completely customized according to the user's preference.

[Axem]

The problem with the wiki page though is the user needs to make a wiki account and don't those need to be manually done at the moment? Even if that's not he case, making the user register yet another account is a roadblock to this being useful. I think something completely automatic and hands off would be best.

[Goober5000]

Wiki accounts don't need to be manually registered, but we've been doing it that way because we get deluged with spam accounts otherwise.  We do try to respond quickly if anyone needs an account.

I don't think the Ultimate Profile would be exactly automatic and hands-off though.  The user would still need to supply the information about all the released mods and upload the pictures.

[Axem]

By automatic and hands off I mean the user doesn't need to do anything more than fill out what they like.

Having everything tightly integrated and easy to use makes a good impression on the person using it and the people using it. If the idea was just "hey make a link in your sig to a page with your stuff" well, we don't need to do anything, do we? Anyone can just link to a page, from the HLP wiki, from actual wikipedia, from some random web hosting page.

[niffiwan]

Could you extract the SMF user login details and use that to create accounts in mediawiki, same password & username, on a daily basis?  I'm presuming that may be easier than setting up a "central" authentication service that both SMF & mediawiki use for logins. OAUTH or SAML would be nice for single signon, but is probably be too much effort.

[Axem]

Well there are a few wikimedia/SMF extensions that have auto log-in/automatic user creation.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Simple_machines_forum_extensions

Perhaps this could be looked into and then a wiki user page link gets added to the user side bar? It also might make people more inclined to help maintain the wiki if everything is more tightly integrated.

[jr2]

Well there are a few wikimedia/SMF extensions that have auto log-in/automatic user creation.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Simple_machines_forum_extensions

Perhaps this could be looked into and then a wiki user page link gets added to the user side bar? It also might make people more inclined to help maintain the wiki if everything is more tightly integrated.

Perhaps make a safeguard that the user has to have been both active (has positive post count) and a user for, say, a week (or more?) before allowing wiki edits, to give us time to weed out the occasional spam account we get?

[Goober5000]

It's not "occasional"; we were getting about a half-dozen per day.  Poor TopAce was banning them and deleting the spam pages as fast as they popped up.

I'll look into the extension to bridge the logins.

[karajorma]

Yeah, but surely Cloudfire will filter out most of the spam HLP accounts before they get the chance to realise the wiki is there.

[Goober5000]

Well, all of the extensions at Axem's link are obsolete, unsupported, have broken links, or all three.  However, one of the extensions is maintained by the simplemachines.org site, and it can be found here, with associated forum thread here.  This seems like our best bet.

However, they recommend that MediaWiki and SMF use the same database, which we do not.  Merging the two databases would be a bit tricky, and is probably best done after the server move.  Not only that, but our MediaWiki installation is somewhat out-of-date and we should update it to reduce security vulnerabilities.