{"id":183,"date":"2014-03-22T15:54:29","date_gmt":"2014-03-22T14:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.magnusmanske.de\/?p=183"},"modified":"2014-03-22T15:54:29","modified_gmt":"2014-03-22T14:54:29","slug":"the-oauth-haters-faq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/archives\/183","title":{"rendered":"The OAuth haters’ FAQ"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shortly after the dawn of the toolserver, the necessity for authentication in some tools became apparent. We couldn’t just let anyone use tools to upload files to Commons, doing so anonymously, hiding behind the tools’ user account; that would be like allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia anonymously. Crazy talk! But toolserver policies forbade tools asking for users’ Wikipedia\/Commons passwords. So, different tool authors came up with different solutions; I created TUSC<\/a> to have a single authentication mechanism across my various tools.<\/p>\n

As some of you may have noticed, some of my new tools that require authentication are using OAuth<\/a> instead of TUSC. Not only that, but I have been busy porting some of my long-standing tools, like flickr2commons<\/a> and now commonshelper<\/a>, to OAuth. This has been met with … unease by various parties. I hope that this post can alleviate some concerns, or at least answer some questions.<\/p>\n

Q: Why did you switch from TUSC to OAuth?<\/em>
\nA: TUSC was a crutch, and always has been. Not only is OAuth a standard technology, it is now also the “official” way to use tools that require user rights on Wikimedia sites.<\/p>\n

Q: So I’m not uploading as your bot, but as myself?<\/em>
\nA: Yes! You took the time and interest to run the tool; that effort should be rewarded, by having the upload associated with your use account. It will be so much easier to see who uploaded a file, to assign glory and blame alike. Also, the army of people who have been haunting me for re-use rights and image sources, just because my name was linked to the uploading bot account, will now come after YOU! Progress!!<\/p>\n

Q: OK, maybe for new tools. But the old tools were working fine!<\/em>
\nA: No, they were not. Years ago, when the WMF changed API login procedure,\u00a0 I switched my tools to use the Peachy toolkit, so I would not have to do the “fiddly bits” myself for every tool. However, a few month ago, something changed again, causing the Peachy uploads to fail. It turned out that Peachy was no longer developed, so I had to go back and hack my own upload code. Something was wrong with that as well, leading to a flurry of bug reports across my Commons-uploading tools. The subsequent switch to OAuth uploads wasn’t exactly smooth for me either, but now that it’s running, it should work nicely for a while. Yeah, right.<\/p>\n

Q: But now all the tools are using JavaScript to upload. I hate JavaScript!<\/em>
\nA: That pesky JavaScript is all over the web these days. So you probably have installed NoScript in your browser (if you don’t, do!). You can easily set an exception for the tools server (or specific tools), so you’re safe from the evil JavaScript out there, while the tools “just work”.<\/p>\n

Q: But now it won’t work in my text browser!<\/em>
\nA: Text browser? In 2014? Really? You seem to be an old-school 1337 hax0r to be using that. All tools on tools.wmflabs.org<\/a> are multi-maintainer; I’ll be happy to add you as a co-maintainer, so you can add a text browser mode to any tool you like. You don’t have time, you say? Fancy that. In the meantime, you could use elinks<\/a> which can support JavaScript.<\/p>\n

Q: But you changed my favourite tool! I don’t like change.<\/em>
\nA: Sorry, Sheldon. The only constant is change.<\/p>\n

In closing, the good old bot<\/a> has clocked over 1.2 million uploads on Commons, or ~6% of all files there. I think it deserves some well-earned rest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shortly after the dawn of the toolserver, the necessity for authentication in some tools became apparent. We couldn’t just let anyone use tools to upload files to Commons, doing so anonymously, hiding behind the tools’ user account; that would be like allowing anyone to edit Wikipedia anonymously. Crazy talk! But toolserver policies forbade tools asking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}