Can one alter the path of the terms of service and privacy policy to pages included on my own wiki as opposed to pages outside of my wiki? The question below about recruitment is still valid. How does the system know that someone has been recruited by another, especially if the confirm account extension is used? Thanks for your response in advance.
Topic on Extension talk:NewSignupPage
Hardcoded URLs are a bug, please report on bugzilla.
@Donkey Kong Genius: Yes, you can edit these by editing the appropriate system message(s). In your case, the message you'll want is MediaWiki:Shoutwiki-loginform-tos.
I have no idea how this extension interacts with the ConfirmAccount extension, as it's not a scenario I've ever tested — but as always, patches are welcome!
As for the user recruitment part...that's tricky. Allow me to explain a bit of history and whatnot first (who knows, maybe someone will find this useful one day). On ArmchairGM, where the social tools originated, in addition to the extensions which we now collectively refer to as "SocialProfile", two other extensions played a major role in making the recruitment process work: InviteContacts and LoginReg.
NewSignupPage is LoginReg reborn; it implements the "backend" parts necessary (including, but most definitely not limited to, the new database table). InviteContacts was, as the name suggests, an extension which allowed you to send out invites to people in your email address book. I've been wanting to fix it since day one, but in the end, it turned out to be impossible. So, for years, there's been no "proper" way to recruit users (although with SocialProfile + NewSignupPage installed, it has always been possible if you know how).
Not that many months ago I decided to resurrect an older project of mine, codenamed MiniInvite — this is essentially InviteContacts without the contact importing functionality. Once tested, finished and released, it allows (registered) users to send out invitation emails to people via a special page. The actual magic is done by two URL parameters, from and referral. If you visit a URL such as http://wiki.example.com/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin/signup&from=1&referral=TheDev and use this URL to sign up on the wiki, points are awarded to the wiki user TheDev for recruiting you (and an event, "TheDev recruited Foo", will show up on the activity feed, Special:UserActivity). This requires both NewSignupPage and SocialProfile, and $wgRegisterTrack has to be set to true in your wiki's LocalSettings.php for the recruitment process to work. I admit that I haven't exactly tested this, so do let me know how it works (or doesn't work) out for you.
@Nemo_bis: Yes and no. Yes, it at least has its roots in a bug, but no, it's not a bug I "created" or can fix. The relevant root bug is bug #10317. Special:UserLogin, especially with the way how it currently (ab)uses QuickTemplate, is not very flexible or extendable. It was tough enough to have the special page changed so that links are parsed in the message (see also Special:Code/MediaWiki/45820 & gerrit:117806). I'm more than well aware of what we generally think of raw HTML messages, but at the time I wrote the patch in question, raw HTML was unfortunately the only solution that really "worked".
Should the URL(s) of the Terms of Use or Privacy Policy ever change, one would need to edit all i18n .json files, which definitely sucks, when you could just do some {{curly brace magic}} inside the message.
As always, patches are more than welcome, although I don't think you can get away without changing core. Do note that the content in includes/templates/ directory is rather scary, though.
Very informative. I will investigate further in the future. For now I am trying to get the Confirm Account extension to work but for the life of me it is not going well.