Mediawiki shut down old passwords. Can it be bypassed

mediawikiwikipedia

As submitted in multiple bug reports, Mediawiki has a recent bug that prevents users with old passwords (such that weren't changed in years) from staying logged in. If such users try logging in, they immediately get logged out.

I'm not talking about local installations, but about their webapps like Wikipedia.

Perhaps Mediawiki will end up fixing it, but who knows when. Thankfully, users who originally supplied an e-mail address can use it to reset their password and thus resolve the issue on their own.

My question is – can you think of any way to bypass this issue for users without a provided email address?

I thought to:

  1. Log in and change password in 1 step.
  2. Log in and add an e-mail address in 1 step.

But couldn't get either to work as each step requires a different form, so 1 step turns to 2.

Best Answer

After carefully reading the aforementioned bug report, here's the non e-mail bypass:

Log in to a Wikimedia project to which you've never logged in and/or to a language version to which you've never logged in.

For example, if you can no longer log in to en.wikipedia.org, then log in to ch.wikipedia.org or en.wiktionary.org. To make sure you've never logged in to these places before, run your user through https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth first (thankfully, this tool doesn't require a login).

That's it! The creation of a new localized user fixes your global account. Now you can log in the actual Wikimedia project which you required in the first place.

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