View source for Password reset

Sometimes an MW user loses access to their account and cannot login. They have a blank or incorrect email address and have forgotten their password. 

The usual response to this situation is to ignore them or to allow some on-wiki user to claim that a password reset is impossible. We do this because changing a user's email address requires shell access, and the workload would quickly escalate beyond reasonable amounts if the service was advertised as something that can be completed via a Bugzilla shell request. The main portion of the work is in avoiding social engineering -- it's necessary to ensure that the email address requested has a legitimate claim to the user account in question.

Occasionally, the requester is someone who, due to long service with the project, has earned the right to ask for 5 minutes of sysadmin time in service of a personal request. The procedure is then as follows:

* Confirm that the email address in question legitimately belongs to the same person as the target account.
* <tt>mwscript eval.php --wiki=&lt;user's main wiki></tt>
* <tt>$user = User::newFromName('&lt;name>');</tt>
* <tt>$user->setEmail('&lt;email>');</tt>
* <tt>$user->setEmailAuthenticationTimestamp(wfTimestampNow());</tt>
* <tt>$user->saveSettings();</tt>
* In your browser, go to Special:PasswordReset on the user's main wiki.
* Type in the user's name and click "email new password".
* Ask requester to check their inbox to ensure that the password reset email was received.

On CentralAuth wikis, the eval.php script has the effect of updating the globaluser table (gu_email and gu_email_authenticated) and then clearing the relevant memcached key (XXwiki:user:id:NNNNNN).

[[Category:How-To]]