i noticed that TWiki Guest is definable

from Users.pm

    # create the guest user
    $this->createUser( $TWiki::cfg{DefaultUserLogin},
                       $TWiki::cfg{DefaultUserWikiName} );

but this i also noticed

TWiki-4.0.0-beta6$ find lib/ -name '*.pm' -exec grep -H 'UnknownUser' '{}' \;  
lib/TWiki/Store/RcsFile.pm:                  user    => 'UnknownUser', 
lib/TWiki/Search.pm:            my $revUser = $topicInfo->{$topic}->{editby} || 'UnknownUser';

I'm thinking of moving all the 'special' users like this into the cfg like guest

motivation

i'm writing a User,Users,Password,Tempate backend for a customer that gets all user and groups info from a database. There are expected to be no user/group topics at all.

Ideally, i'd like to have the changes logged directly to the natrul spaced out username as registered in the other system, but as TWiki spasses out with that, I'm replaceing all spaces with _ for now.

i am also considering that for mods like this, it would look better if TWikiContributor user gets rendered as 'TWiki_Contributor' so its consistent with the other users. I think that the way that the lookup works, I'll be able to to so, once I define these users in the cfg, with the login name == the name in the META

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1. does anyone know of more 'special' usernames that i should be aware of
2. same thing for groups
3. have we got them all doccoed?
   • Should this be fixed for TWiki-4? - i'm working under the assumption that i should only fix actual bugs / inconsistencies that will cause less involved users/admins/developers problems. (the testing load alone should disqualify it
4. I'm wondering if we're not better off storing username in the log/.changes/META

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I think TWikiAdminGroup and UnknownUser are the only ones.

I needed UnknownUser because I had to distinguish between TWikiGuest, who is a potentially logged-in user, and a real nonexistent user. TWikiAdmin is a user that I probably should have created, but didn't because of the security implications. I decided to use TWikiAdminGroup instead (though clearly got that wrong! See elsewhere).

TWikiContributor was intended to link to the TWikiContributor topic, so a click takes you to the list of contributors.

Don't forget TWikiRegistrationAgent

I don;t see anything specific here in the way of proposals, so I'm discarding it. If you add specific proposals, feel free to reopen it.

CC