After some research, I found that there is an entitlement give to users who validate their email address at https://secure-www.novell.com/selfreg/jsp/protected/validateEmail.jsp. This is the same entitlement required for Bugzilla users. I am working with our iChain admin to get entitlement information passed to the wiki, and then having our login script check for that entitlement. If the user has the entitlement, then the login will continue as usual. If the user does not have the entitlement, the wiki will stop the login and redirect the user to some other page.

Since there are probably a number of legitimate users who have not validated their email address, I thought it would be nice if they were taken to a page explaining the new policy and containing a link to the validate email page listed above. I have asked Thomas Schmidt to design such a page to be put somewhere on www.opensuse.org to accomplish this. However, now that I think about it, a better alternative might be to create a wiki page with the explanation and then redirect users there. Another alternative is to simply redirect users straight to the email validation page. What does everyone think? If we were to create a page on the wiki, what would be the best namespace for it?

In addition to http://en.opensuse.org/MediaWiki:GoogleSearch, I have been experimenting with Lucene search, and I have installed it on http://enstage.opensuse.org as a replacement for the default search. So far, it looks really good. Pretty soon, we should be able to have the staging server upgraded, after which I will install the newest version of the Lucene MW search. This version will have much better features. Stay tuned on https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=625677 for updates.