So one of the things that's bugged me about LiveJournal's implementation of OpenID is that the authorizing URL is used as the display name. This can get awkward in (for example) comment discussions. I don't particularly want someone replying to me saying something like, "Yeah, I agree with what desh.livejournal.com said upthread, but not with what bradfitz.com said", and even more so if the URL is long and/or doesn't point to a common site. It's not conducive to discussion if you can't call someone something that looks kind of like a name or handle.
Has this issue been thought about for DreamWidth? If not, I have some possible solutions: 1. Try to infer a display name from the URL. This could be done just for some common (whitelisted) sites, or also for unknown sites that have a URL that looks like it might be "username.site.com" or "site.com/~username", or also for things that look like personal URLs and don't have subdomains/subdirectories, or whatever. Displayed names could look like "desh [site: livejournal.com]" and "bradfitz [site: bradfitz.com]", or something like that. 2a. Let OpenID users set a display name of their choice, if that username isn't already taken. Their OpenID URL could display after it, like "desh [desh.livejournal.com]". 2b. Let OpenID users set a display name of their choice, namespaced separately from other account names. This would make more sense if community names are also namespaced separately, which I think was discussed at some point? I can't remember, and don't know where DW is on that idea at this point. 2c. Let OpenID users set a display name that doesn't have to be unique at all. This is perhaps strange in the LJ-code paradigm where display names are also URLs and therefore have to be unique, but on other blogs where users can sign comments with whatever username linked to whatever (non-OpenID) URL they want, it's less strange. 3. Maybe there's some supported way to do this within the OpenID protocol itself? I'm way behind on that. 4. Any other ideas I haven't thought of yet... What do y'all think? Thanks, Josh Rosenberg (LJ: desh) _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
