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I can see why a non tech-savvy user would be confused by OpenID but I it surprises me how many programmers are confused by it. On the login page they list a b
by Simucal 16y ago
I can see why a non tech-savvy user would be confused by OpenID but I it surprises me how many programmers are confused by it.
On the login page they list a bunch of common providers you can login with if you already have an account with them: Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, etc. Click their icon, type in your credentials.
If you don't have an account with one of those or don't wish to use them then it has a big register link to sign up with a myOpenID account.
- chc 16y agoYou're making the same mistake as people who try to get programmers to fix their printer because programmers are "computer people." Competence with one technology does not confer instant familiarity with another — and however clear you might find OpenID, just the array of company logos alone is kind of overwhelming and highly unusual. Pretty much the opposite of "Don't make me think."
- Locke1689 16y agoTo a certain extent, security will always have to make the user think. There's simply no way around that without complete service dictation.
- chc 16y agoYes, but Stack Overflow's signup screen takes more thinking than most sites (by virtue of being different, not to mention its complexity). Amazon's signup is far simpler and it does not seem to be terribly insecure.
- Locke1689 16y agoActually if you have an older Amazon account it was shown to be pretty terribly insecure.
- Flenser 16y agoIt can't be any harder than selecting your card type on the checkout page of every online store on the web.
- carols10cents 16y agoWhich is actually unnecessary since afaik you can tell what brand a card is from the first digit.
- fleitz 16y agoOpenID makes absolutely no sense to me. Unless they have the sites in a drop down it takes about 5 minutes to read the OpenID spec, google around for where to get the openID url and paste it into the box. OpenID is a solution in search of a problem. It may have actually been useful if it leveraged DNS SRV records so you could login as foo@bar.com and it would query SRV _openid.bar.com for the URL.
- rmccue 16y agoI'm working on a spec similar to this, but using TXT records (as they're URLs, not just servers). I wonder if anyone would be interested in me putting up what I have on this already?
- jtheory 16y agoThat flexibility is what killed me with SO. I used the site for many months after creating an account, always recognized when I returned to the site. Then one day I was signed out -- the cookie finally timed out, or was cleared somehow, etc., and I arrived at the login page, and was totally stymied. I always sign up for new services using their_domain@my_domain.tld, and that hadn't been possible here, apparently, because asking for a reminder with stackoverflow@my_domain.tld failed. Ah, I must have registered with an account at any of these half-dozen sites. Well, I have accounts at all of them -- sometimes multiple accounts for different purposes -- all using different email addresses. I had no recollection at all of which I had chosen; I was totally stymied. After a few days of trying different ways of getting in, I finally figured out the right one (still don't recall), and then could set stackoverflow@my_domain.tld as my backup email, so now I'm covered... but it was the worst sign-in experience I've ever had.