It's a royal pain in the ass. Like everyone else in the world, I already have a well-established workflow for managing usernames and passwords. My favorite too

It's a royal pain in the ass. Like everyone else in the world, I already have a well-established workflow for managing usernames and passwords. My favorite tool is 1Password for the Mac. It works seamlessly with the majority of websites. It doesn't work well with Stack Overflow. Most sites log me in with one keypress; Stack Overflow now takes two keypresses and a mouse click, and that's after I carefully set it up by hand, because the auto-learning feature doesn't work with OpenID. I resisted using OpenID for months because I didn't want my login on Stack Overflow to be tied inextricably to my Yahoo or Google identity. I can change a password, and on well-designed sites I can even change a username, but I can't change my OpenID on Stack Overflow by any means that I can find. (Yeah, I know I could have used some kind of identity-forwarding fu to use my own domain as an OpenID, and then forwarded the actual task of running an OpenID server to some other entity that I could change at will. Whatever. I don't want to have to read a goddamn FAQ in order to log in to Stack Overflow, of all things. Even the Treasury Department, which has the most baroque login scheme I have ever seen, involving a personalized plastic card and an onscreen keyboard, doesn't make me read a manual in order to use their site.) (And, yeah, I know that there are honest and hardworking startups dedicated to providing me with an OpenID. Not to put too fine a point on it: If my Stack Overflow ID is going to be inextricably tied to somebody else's website being up, I'm going to pick a website that has been up for at least one decade, and promises to remain up for as many future decades as possible. If my identity can't be made to live as long as me, I've got a problem.) So I finally gave in and signed up with my Yahoo OpenID. I have no idea why I picked them over Google. I doubt it was for their track record of preserving user privacy. But the pain did not end, because I proceeded to forget which ID I had used. In their zeal to ensure that everyone on Earth is pre-provided with an OpenID, the standard's proponents have created a monster: My OpenIDs outnumber my uses for OpenID by an order of magnitude. I have a bunch of Google accounts, and I tried one or two of them, and then I just decided that I had better things to do than write that post on Stack Overflow. If I hadn't happened to have left another machine logged in to the site with a very long-term cookie, my username would be gone forever. (They can't email you a hint, because they don't capture email addresses.) At least now I've taught it to 1Password, and if that fails me I can Google up this rant. ;) Sadly, all of this has had the Pavlovian effect of making me feel really angry every time I see the login screen at Stack Overflow, a truly useful and even inspiring site which I read fairly often. Never a second chance to make a first impression, I guess.