title: Disabling user accounts in MediaWiki
body: <p>I have a wiki family that has several thousand users that I need to manage. We do not have an elegant way of disabling any of the users that have left the program, in the past we have been able to change their passwords, but this is not a lasting solution for the future. I have investigated a couple different ways of disabling a user account, but I'm not sure which option to choose.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>The <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension%3aCentralAuth" rel="nofollow">CentralAuth</a> extension - This is pretty complicated to set up for a wiki family and is tied very closely to the wikipedia core development. I got as far as migrating my users into the centralauth global user table. This setup does not take into account table prefixes, which we use extensively. The special pages associated with the extension are all broken because of this.</p></li>
  <li><p>IP Blocking - I can't use this since the multiple users may access the wiki from the same IP, at a work station or computer lab.</p></li>
  <li><p>A hook on login - Could possibly use a hook (UserLoginComplete) when the user logs in, then log them out immediately based on a flag set in the database. </p></li>
  <li><p>Shared Permissions - I took a look at a couple extensions that allow global permissions, but many of them are not stable or in beta, for example: <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension%3aSharedUserRights" rel="nofollow">SharedUserRights</a>. The idea here is to create an 'inactive' permission and manage accounts globally with that permission group.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I'm open to ideas! Hopefully this all makes sense, thanks in advance! </p>