Web designers wanted!

[Johnathan404]

So to respond to the post above, yes the website is seriously 'broke'.

[Euan]

I tend to ignore the Wiki because of the log in issue but still go through occasional bouts of disconnection anyway.

Usually I don't bother logging in when browsing the wiki unless I wish to make edits. I do, however, log in every time I visit the forums even if I don't intend to write a post as some forums (e.g. unleashed, fastasy ideas, quizzes etc) are only visible while logged in.

[A8(M)]

When we took the decision a while back to implement single sign on between phpBB and MediaWiki (at the time of putting the Wiki live) there was a MW plug in which handled authentication via phpBB's auth db, which worked well: I think at some point in an upgrade path (necessary for other reasons) it broke, and since it wasn't maintained couldn't be revived. Sadly this is how OSS often works.

That login issue sounds like top priority. I wonder how possible it would be to contribute an upgrade to that plugin ourselves (provided that it hasn't already been upgraded to be able to cope with the SABRE upgrade, or that a simpler solution is not available).

[ScottB5411]

It's been kind of an Achilles heel for a while now, annoys a lot of people, you'll be warmly appreciated if you fix that niggle

[Ritchie333]

The login mechanism uses phpbbauth extension. It seems it's had some updates. Basically, I know people reported login issues on the wiki, but I could never reliably duplicate them to the point where I could identify a fix.

Basically, years ago when the wiki was first set up, I wrote a custom sawn-off hack to get a single login working all over the site, and it worked ... until we upgraded the software, at which point it broke. It also never worked with bots. So I had a look around and this seemed to fit the bill; it doesn't have us 100% responsibility for it and ought to at least get tested on other sites too, but the maintainers have been happy to integrate bugfixes back to them.