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Trust and Safety Product/Decision records/2024-06-24 Mechanism for disabling temp accounts

< Trust and Safety Product‎ | Decision records
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T356524

Authors

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Status

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  • Accepted on 2024-06-14

Context

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As we deploy temporary accounts, we should allow for the possibility of needing to disable them in an emergency for some reason, after having enabled them.

Options considered

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- Not allowing anonymous editing at all after temporary accounts have been enabled - Finding some way to completely undeploy temp accounts

Decision

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Introduce a config flag to specify that temporary accounts are "known" on the wiki. The known flag can be true, while temporary account auto creation is false. Code that checks a username to see if it is a temp account should use the "known" flag while code that cares about the account creation process should check the "enabled" flag.

Consequences

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  • IP editing can be re-enabled on a wiki if "known" is set to true and "enabled" is set to false
  • Temp account creation can be safely disabled after being enabled
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