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I've installed MediaWiki aiming to create some one-man-editing Wiki;
Anyone can read in that wiki (no one has to register to read and can read anonymously) but editing is only by me; a website where I can write on detailed subjects from my own standpoint.

I went through the documentation but I found no variable that controls whether anonymous users can create an account or not.

Do you know how can an admin user totally disable the option to create an accounts?

2 Answers 2

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+100

If you are trying to set up a Simple private wiki, this is done by adding the following options to the MediaWiki configuration file LocalSettings.php :

# Disable reading by anonymous users
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false;

# Disable anonymous editing
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

# Prevent new user registrations except by sysops
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

For restricting only editing but not reading, omit the first instruction, leaving in place the last two.

Omit also the last instruction if you want to allow new user registrations.

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  • Hi dear Harry. Question edited.
    – user529857
    Apr 10, 2019 at 6:00
  • Answer also edited.
    – harrymc
    Apr 10, 2019 at 6:10
  • Thanks ! It worked opposite (true, false, false); Can award bounty in 22 hours.
    – user529857
    Apr 10, 2019 at 6:17
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I've gone through this a few times and you have a couple options. None of these alone will solve all of your fake user issues, but together they will go a long way. Before we about disabling accounts, let's talk about prevention (because you will get more fake accounts in the future). This page has a lot of good information in regards to this topic, but I'll highlight a few things that helped me specifically.

  1. Make sure you add a captcha Adding a required captcha or re-captcha to a media wiki will help with bots, but less with people spamming the site. I noticed when I added this I saw a large downturn in fake users. Eventually though, they picked back up because real-people began adding to the site.

  2. Email validation If you're running a more personal media wiki (for example, a research lab) it may be practical to have users admins authenticate additional users. Of course, this isn't practical if this is a general media wiki site. You can also enable email validation for the users themselves. You'd be suprised how far you can go with requiring users to put in a valid email.

  3. Password Security You can require that your password be very specfic in order to combat bot usage that many times have a specfic combination of letters and numbers for their generated passwords. Plus, you can set password expirations to help with bots that are stateless.

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