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We're turning off Clickpass March 15. How to keep your HN account.
We're going to stop supporting Clickpass on March 15. If you use
Clickpass to log in to Hacker News, please
(1) put your email address
in your profile (no one can see it except you and us), then
(2)
change your password by going to http://news.ycombinator.com/changepw.
- spicyj 15y agoWhile we're on this topic, can you add a note to the profile page that says that email isn't publicly visible? This seems to be a common source of confusion.
- alt_ 15y agoThere's already a bright yellow box that informs you about that, but it only shows when the e-mail field is empty.
- dragonFury 15y agoi think there's a note there already that the email address will not be publicized.
- StavrosK 15y agoAre there any plans for BrowserID auth, perhaps?
- latchkey 15y agoYes! Please please please implement BrowserId. This is the one authentication/login system that actually has a real fighting chance. We've implemented it for our site (next to FB login) and we are really happy with it.
- atdt 15y agoCould you explain why? When I last looked, a crucial component wasn't specced, meaning you had to rely on Mozilla for part of the handshake. Have things change?
- latchkey 15y agoWhy what? Why we are happy with it? It is easy to implement and the people creating it are smart. They've done a good job so far, I see no reason why it won't be successful in the future. The browser integration will be amazing when its ready, but until then, it is the closest thing to FB auth without requiring FB or people to give up their friends list or other information they are concerned about. I'm not sure what 'crucial component' you are talking about, but we are just using browserid.org.
- lrobb 15y agoHow are your conversions? I'm looking at implementing this for a new site...
- AndrewHampton 15y agoI just followed the steps, but I'm getting a "Bad login." message when I try to sign in using Chrome's incognito mode. How long before the new username/password combo works?
- pg 15y agoIt should work immediately. So either you mistyped something or incognito mode does something that breaks login.
- skeletonjelly 15y agoI can't see it being the latter. I've used incognito mode to test logins for web development and there's nothing out of the ordinary.
- Sukotto 15y agoMake sure you use correct capitalization of your username. The login screen is case sensitive. (Which seems crazy to me)
- AndrewHampton 15y agoIt's working now, so I guess it was the capitalization, thanks.
- manuscreationis 15y agoAny particular reason for the change? (Just curious)
- dotBen 15y agoWhen a tech-audience orientated website like HN stops using OpenID, I think we can say that OpenID is firmly dead. Sad, I think HN was one of my last consumers of my OpenID account.
- rickette 15y agoDo you think? Whenever I get a change to use OpenID on a website I immediately do so. I personally think it's very useful but perhaps a bit too complicated for non-tech users. Although the OpenID provider buttons (think StackOverflow) do make it easier.
- sp332 15y agoI really like using OpenID on StackExchange sites. I just click the "Google" button and I'm logged in! What's funny to me is how many sites rushed to be OpenID providers, but there were not very many consumers. I tried counting once but I lost count at 15 OpenID accounts that I have from various sites. So much for single sign-on.
- pnathan 15y agoI really like OpenID. As a rule of thumb, I prefer OpenID whenever I can...
- Poiesis 15y ago(no one can see it except you and us) Offtopic, but I used to think that too until a coworker I'd never met emailed me using that address, warning me that apparently the proxy had cached my view of my profile page and he was able to view it. Has this been fixed yet?
- ComputerGuru 15y agoThe only real way to solve it is to use HTTPS. The Gmail team had this problem for the longest time and is one of the biggest reasons they added forced-HTTPS as an option in account settings. Whatever you do, there will always be a non-trivial number of ISPs and company networks that have misconfigured proxies that overzealously cache sensitive data and display to everyone with not a care in the world.
- biot 15y agoYou mean nobody can see it except you, YC, and the man in the middle? Your system is setup to ask your corporate proxy to fetch unencrypted pages for you. That proxy may be configured to make a physical printout on your boss's printer of every page you request and there's nothing YC can do about that beyond offering https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ for you to use. That, too, may not be sufficient if your company has its own trusted SSL cert installed which is used to proxy and intercept everything so that all your internet activity can be decrypted.
- aprescott 15y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ is available! https HN links come up in Google results (at least from memory).
- candeira 15y agoA suggestion: please have users input their new password twice to catch typos.
- DiabloD3 15y agoI've never heard of Clickpass, what is it?
- sciurus 15y agoBringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/clickpass-could-change-the-way-you-surf-the-web/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/clickpass-could-change-the-...
- jzila 15y agoIs there a blog post associated with this decision somewhere? Is my scenario of logging in with a Google account that uncommon? (just FYI, until this decision, HN had the most seamless signup procedure I've ever encountered on a website)
- wickedchicken 15y agocrosses fingers scribd next, right?
- mbq 15y agoBoo, give me OpenID back! Or at least don't do password reset via HTTP.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago> Or at least don't do password reset via HTTP. Huh?
- jbarham 15y agoUse HTTPS for password reset, not (unencrypted) HTTP.
- ars 15y agoSince notifo is shutting down are you going to remove that?
- Splines 15y agoIs there a standard to support web callbacks (or whatever they're called)? I wouldn't mind hooking up HN to Prowl, since that's what I did with Notifo anyway.
- swapsmagic 15y agoWhat is the reason behind stop supporting it?
- KevinMS 15y agoThe fact that Clickpass even exists made me realize openID was DOA. I spent a day implementing openID for the users of my website, because I realized, hey, what a cool idea, a URL can represent a single user on the internet, and that user can authenticate against it universally. The sad truth was that I could not expect a single one of my users to even understand what the hell was going on, because for most test openID accounts I set up on yahoo, etc, I couldn't figure out how to use them. Only the hand-holdy sites exclusively for openid even bothered to tell me what my personal URL was and how to use it. That was when I realized that Clickpass only exists because the implementation of OpenID was a total pooch screw. If the OpenID standard had required it be simple, like the URL must follow this template - google.com/openid/kevinms and yahoo.com/openid/kevinms, and the user just pasted this into the box, I think it might have been a success. But because they didn't, and they convoluted it more with the concept of your "unique identity on the internet", you need third party services, which are unnecessary layers that are completely confusing to the user.
- ww520 15y agoGood feedback on OpenId. What do you think of BrowserId?
- justjohn 15y agoI always thought that the problem with openID is they didn't use email addresses instead of URLs. e.g. use john@example.com and require a certain url template for the endpoint e.g. example.com/openid/john That way I don't have to remember another identifier and we already trust at least part of our identity to our email provider. Not perhaps as open, but much more approachable as a user.
- xp84 15y agoHate that idea. I don't want to have to share my email address, in fact that's a primary reason why I always use my open ID (which is unrelated) when possible. Providing email as a credential creates an implicit, if not explicit, invitation "Here, spam me." This is why I'm generally against using email as an identifier. Other examples that all suck for this reason: Apple IDs. Windows Live ID. Jabber.
- vessenes 15y agohttps link would be nice, unless I misunderstood what was happening there, my password went out in the clear.
- eslaught 15y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/changepw https://news.ycombinator.com/changepw works just fine actually, even though pg apparently forgot to put the 's' in the link.
- rb2k_ 15y agoPSA: Putting your email address in your profile is important. I once used to be "rb2k", but then I forgot the password I used back then and ended up as "rb2k_". There is no way to reset the password on an account if you're not adding an email :(
- wizard_2 15y agoI'd like it if you could still support openID. It's still very useful despite it's flaws.
- Drbble 15y agoThanks. Big win for user security on the Internet.
- icebraining 15y agoHow so?
- dazbradbury 15y agoI would love an overview of why you're moving away from using Clickpass... Clearly people are using it (given this message), and as many of us are web developers, the thought process behind this decision would be potentially very interesting. Do you plan to move to a different system (FB Connect/Twitter/Google Identity Toolkit), or are you happy with a standard username/password model? Are too many people joining HN and you simply want to add some friction to the process?! Also, clickpass will need to update their site: http://www.clickpass.com/docs/where-you-can-use-clickpass http://www.clickpass.com/docs/where-you-can-use-clickpass
- lhnn 15y agoObviously, many people would like to know why this is being done, if not for matters of convenience, for curiosity.
- MichaelApproved 15y agoHow will you let others know once this falls off the front page?
- immad 15y agoI am one of the co-founders of Clickpass and I think this is a great move. I wrote the HN code in about 2 days and I was learning lisp/arc so it was awful code (RTM did the openID part) and literally no one has touched Clickpass code for 2.5 years. The fact that it still works is always surprising to me :). Also I think Oauth beat OpenID hands down.
- dshah 15y agoDid you mean "no one has touched the code in 2.5 years?" If so, then that is indeed, surprising. And yes, OAuth did beat OpenID, but they're not really the same kind of thing.
- immad 15y agoI know, but for all intents and purposes OAuth ended up being a super set of OpenID. --- corrected years
- petenixey 15y agoIt's a credit to your code Immad that it is still working.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kfcm 15y agoIt might be a good idea to make this a "sticky post", and keep it in the top 10 until March 15 (or 16th). Maybe even automagically move it up the closer we get to March 15th.
- donniezazen 15y agoSomething in line of clickpass is good. It saves people from making hundreds of accounts and same passwords for many sites.
- petenixey 15y agoImmad's already weighed in on this but as the other Clickpass co-founder I also support this decision. OAuth has definitely trumped OpenID as a protocol but turning off Clickpass shouldn't be seen as a reflection on either protocol and is simply removing a dependency on unsupported and remotely hosted code. Immad did an incredible job of writing code that has run and run however since acquisition there is minimal and subsequently no support behind the codebase. I would like to thank both PG and the users of Clickpass here who have been such ardent supporters of it over the years. We tried hard to make it attractive to developers and we received a lot of support for that - thank you.