The weather that Tom brings us on OpenID is mixed but good in the long run. He says that community is what counts 🙂
Here’s what I learned enabling the sites with OpenID:The Good: OpenID registration is a beautiful thing. The legacy registration page on Stuffopolis can be scrapped. Once that happens, validating email addresses, requiring passwords and lost password security questions for new members will be forever outsourced to the OpenID providers (those that your website trusts).
The Bad: When introducing OpenID, it is a breeze for new members coming to the site, but it can be a little confusing for existing members who registered with the legacy credentials. When those existing members find out about the OpenID option, instead of logging in with the legacy credentials to add the OpenID to their account, they often log in with their new OpenID instead. This log-in will attempt to create a new account by fetching simple registration data from their identity provider. If their email address (sent by their identity provider) matches the one already registered with their legacy account, they can be given some instructions, but sometimes it doesn’t match and now we have a problem because if they go back and log in with the legacy credentials, they can’t associate their new OpenID to it because another account (the one they accidentally created) now has that OpenID.
Update 12/17: What I need to do is when a member goes to his profile page and attempts to modify his OpenID, after a successful OpenID authentication, if the site detects that there is another account with the same OpenID, then the site will ask the member to confirm that he wants the other account deleted, making sure there is only one account with that OpenID.
The Ugly: Now that some popular open source packages (wordpress, mediawiki, phpBB) support OpenID, the software should honor each other’s OpenID sessions so that someone who logs into mediawiki with his OpenID doesn’t get presented with an OpenID login form when he visits phpBB, for instance. Although this isn’t a huge problem, it is a little ugly and it seems it will require a standard way of registering OpenID apps on a system so that an OpenID session state change in one app will inform the others.
In a nutshell: OpenID is still immature, but it has an extraordinarily committed community behind it and when it comes to software, that’s what counts.
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