Shiny things are shiny! OpenID comment claiming beta!

[azurelunatic]

The newest, shiniest, and hilariously-beta-shenaniganed feature of them all is here!

http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/claim

Yep, claim your OpenID comments with your DW journal. Once you have claimed an OpenID account, comments left by that account (already posted, on subsequent imports, and possibly even comments left when you wander around logged in as it) will appear as left by your main account. (This is a step towards merging/linked journals, and it's amazing funtimes.) (I am incoherent with sleep dep. I wanted to post this before falling over on my face.)

This is the "mark was up until 3am and zombified coding and fixing the stuff we discovered that wasn't working" level beta, so if you're not down with beta shenanigans, hang back and watch the rest of us discover hilarious things like problems with primary keys that were a little too narrowly defined, or that thing with the userpics that rainne ran into. (That should be resolved. If you see weird keywords associated with comments, like you know you did not use that userpic AND YET SOMEHOW...!!, holler. This is the sort of hilarious fun that goes down in IRC over the North American night.)

It's not linked on the site yet, because it's so very new-beta; not sure whether it'll go through the betafeatures page or whether it'll go directly live after initial testing is over.

Procedure:

1. Make sure you're logged in to the home site for your OpenID under the correct account. For example, when claiming my OpenID comments as azurelunatic.livejournal.com, I need to be logged in to LiveJournal as azurelunatic, not as garnetdagger or any other random journal.


2. Make sure you're logged in to Dreamwidth as the correct journal (your actual Dreamwidth journal, not the OpenID, and the correct journal if you have more than one of those).
   Visit http://www.dreamwidth.org/openid/claim and enter the OpenID location of the account whose comments you want to claim. For my LJ, this would be azurelunatic.livejournal.com


3. Double-check to make sure that it's right and you're not accidentally claiming all your fannish comments with your work journal, unless you're into that.


4. Press the happy little button. Depending on what you've told the OpenID provider to do about Dreamwidth, the following may happen: a) blink and wham it's a message saying that you'll get an email in about an hour (you already told the OpenID provider to always authenticate you to DW), b) you'll go to the OpenID provider's site and get a message asking whether you want to affirm that it's you -- forever, once, or cancel that shit, c) you'll get told to log in/log in to the right-ass account, d) DW will tell you sorrowfully that it couldn't find enough information to get you logged in.
   • (If you have a custom style at LJ or wherever, this can sometimes fuck with OpenID authenticating right. OpenID depends on a little snippet of invisible code being in the right place to say, hi, it's really me, go talk to the right bit of LJ's computer to prove it. Fixing that is a little beyond the scope of what I know how to do, but swapping to a regular system style which presumably has that shit in place may help, if that's the problem.)
5. Wait for a while. (This wait may not be the full hour, but it's not immediate on purpose -- since it would be a ball of petrified yarn to untangle, it shouldn't be easy to do accidentally if it was not intentional.)


6. Get the email. Confirm that all of the everything is right. Click the confirmation link if it is.


7. Wham! Your comments as left by the OpenID should start to show up as left by your DW account that you just linked it up with. If icon information was imported with the comments, and you have an icon of that keyword on DW now, your icons should start to show, which is pretty spiffy. (Of course, in my case, the second time around when I was setting things up to claim my IJ account, I ran into Fun At 2am With Primary Keys, and went off to go tell Mark what he'd coded.)

This is still beta-y, and it is now Monday morning so Mark won't have a chance to actively go bang on deep code for a while (given that he has a day job until such time as DW can hire him back at supporting-a-family-in-the-Bay-Area experienced dev rates) but if you notice problems or whatever. So there is plenty of time to figure out how it breaks and notice problems. (I'm not sure where the best place to shout out about problems on this one would be, nor refinements/enhancements. Not sure that there's a central place for that yet, as there is no official announcement save the buglog.)

omg this is aawwwweesome. :D

Comments

[elf]

Ohh, this is *awesome*. This is One More Step towards being able to delete my LJ entirely yay.

(ooh, I could do it with IJ too! Wow!)

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Heh. Visiting that page gives me the opportunity to claim my OpenID comments. I'm not feeling brave enough to see what happens if I try to claim my existing comments to the account they already belong to.

Maybe later.

[jamoche]

Minor suggestion: the field to enter your OpenID should be wider so you can see the whole thing without scrolling. Once you've put ".livejournal.com" in, it's only got space to show about 4 more characters.

[foxfirefey]

Oh man, that is an interesting edge case!

[owl]

Eeeeeeeee!

[ex_mrs260625]

Yay! *Waits for e-mail*

[azurelunatic]

I discovered the fun with the primary key when I went to claim my IJ's comments. But that's working now. Hooray!

[h0b0ctn.livejournal.com]

I do feel comfortable trying it out using this account though.

[h0b0ctn.livejournal.com]

"Sorry, there was a problem."

I suppose next on the list would be to try claiming the OpenID comments for one account on a different OpenID account.

Uh oh

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Bad thought here, and it kind of touches on how OpenID is a non-continuous identity system.

When I make a comment, using this OpenID account, you know that it was made by the person who had control of the fiddlingfrog account on LJ at the time the comment was made. If I rename from fiddlingfrog I have no way of claiming any of these comments as mine because I'm no longer in control of fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com.

Conversely, if someone later comes along and renames to fiddlingfrog, what's to stop them from logging onto DW and claiming all of my comments as theirs? Or worse, what's to stop some malicious bastard from re-registering some defunct website like GreatestJournal, and claiming every comment from that website all to a single DW account?

[trixieleitz]

YAY!!!

[azurelunatic]

I discovered in poking around that since OpenID accounts don't have journals on LJ/IJ/DW, and that's where the "hi, it's really me" code is, it fails.

Re: Uh oh

[automaticdoor]

Ooooooh good point.

[automaticdoor]

*squee*

Re: Uh oh

[yvi]

Yeah, my journal on LJ is purged, so people can rename to it and then claim here if they really want to.

[goodbyebird]

Yay! Also, thanks for the guide :D

[mswyrr]

Cool! Thank you.