4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

BasT · 2010-09-07 09:44:18

I'm usually very reluctant about creating new accounts on websites, so it took quite a while for me to do so here.
However now it looks like it actually takes not one but four seperate accounts to access all of archlinux.org (forums, AUR, bugtracker and wiki)!
Please tell me I'm wrong about this!

I'm not exactly mad about this but rather considerably annoyed. Gives the strong impression of contributions not being valued much.

/rant

Last edited by BasT (2010-09-07 09:44:36)

karol · 2010-09-07 10:18:52

At the moment you do need separate logins.
You're right, it's annoying.

gtklocker · 2010-09-07 10:31:13

No, I think it's good.

Someone may only want to report a bug, not to join the forums.

ngoonee · 2010-09-07 10:32:08

Different systems. No-one has stepped up to do the necessary coding to unify everything.

This has been mentioned before. Nothing has come of it precisely because its not a big enough annoyance (most browsers memorize passwords anyway) to the right people.

litemotiv · 2010-09-07 10:38:58

BasT wrote:

Gives the strong impression of contributions not being valued much.

What does this have to do with the value of contributions?

karol · 2010-09-07 10:44:17

litemotiv wrote:

BasT wrote:
Gives the strong impression of contributions not being valued much.
What does this have to do with the value of contributions?

It's all about the attitude.
Arch doesn't make you jump through hoops just to ask a question of file a bug (it's just a registration) so I think OP would like to have anonymous posting / single sign-on.

wonder · 2010-09-07 10:56:28

BasT wrote:

Gives the strong impression of contributions not being valued much.

i don't recall you doing any contributions implementing this stuff. patches welcomed

Last edited by wonder (2010-09-07 10:56:52)

karol · 2010-09-07 11:15:56

wonder wrote:

BasT wrote:
Gives the strong impression of contributions not being valued much.
i don't recall you doing any contributions implementing this stuff. patches welcomed

I think you're aware that's a chicken-egg problem: users don't want to contribute because they feel their contribution are not being valued much and devs would like to see the users participating and not only discussing things. :-)

stqn · 2010-09-07 11:22:35

You can just use the same login and password on all official Arch web sites; it really doesn't take that much time and doesn't require you to remember 4 different passwords.

(I'm sick of sites requiring a registration for anything, but for Arch, well... it's just worth it, and the registration process is painless AFAIR.)

litemotiv · 2010-09-07 11:32:56

karol wrote:

Arch doesn't make you jump through hoops just to ask a question of file a bug (it's just a registration) so I think OP would like to have anonymous posting / single sign-on.

Well the software that we use upstream versions of (forum, wiki) will never be integrated, unless both decide to support OpenID or something like that.

For the other two, someone needs to volunteer to dive into Flyspray + AUR and come up with a secure way of sharing accounts + cookies with FluxBB. Security is very important, so it's not only a matter of "SELECT username FROM flux.users". The alternative of creating multiple accounts once (1 minute of work) and then logging in once and check the 'remember me' box is not that bad i think.

BasT · 2010-09-07 12:01:03

litemotiv wrote:

What does this have to do with the value of contributions?

As karol said it's got to do with how many hoops you make people jump through.
Unless you don't mind signing up for every forum/wiki/bugtracker you come across there will be a threshold to how much you care about contributing before you sign up.
Having had to sign up for 3 of those 4 arch accounts (no wiki account needed sofar) to get a minor problem solved for which I actually have a workaround seems a bit excessive to me. But I'd prefer for it to be solved properly.
But since this is arch and the signup is painless enough it's not that big a deal. On other sites i wouldn't put up with it though.

Didn't want to step on anyones toes, just let it be known that it is an annoyance which may turn people (like me ) off.

litemotiv · 2010-09-07 12:29:46

BasT wrote:

As karol said it's got to do with how many hoops you make people jump through.
Unless you don't mind signing up for every forum/wiki/bugtracker you come across there will be a threshold to how much you care about contributing before you sign up.
Having had to sign up for 3 of those 4 arch accounts (no wiki account needed sofar) to get a minor problem solved for which I actually have a workaround seems a bit excessive to me. But I'd prefer for it to be solved properly.
But since this is arch and the signup is painless enough it's not that big a deal. On other sites i wouldn't put up with it though.
Didn't want to step on anyones toes, just let it be known that it is an annoyance which may turn people (like me ) off.

If you're really going to use Arch you will likely spend hundreds of hours over the next couple of years tweaking and fixing your system, so you could say that the current approach is an excellent first step to weed out the lazy and uninterested.

(lulz intended)

ngoonee · 2010-09-07 12:41:04

BasT wrote:

Didn't want to step on anyones toes, just let it be known that it is an annoyance which may turn people (like me ) off.

Disclaimer: This comment is not targetted at you (Bast) at all, since you HAVE bothered to sign up for those accounts.

Comment: If people get turned off by having to sign up for an account, good riddance =p.

Explanation: Someone who can't be arsed to sign up for multiple accounts probably can't be arsed to do the basics like search the wiki, search the internet, read some man pages, basic debugging, checking error logs, etc. Ergo they're likely help vampires in any case.

steve___ · 2010-09-07 13:19:06

stqn wrote:

You can just use the same login and password on all official Arch web sites; it really doesn't take that much time and doesn't require you to remember 4 different passwords.

This is not true. Some of the four do not accept underscores in the username.

anonymous_user · 2010-09-10 00:24:14

ngoonee wrote:

Explanation: Someone who can't be arsed to sign up for multiple accounts probably can't be arsed to do the basics like search the wiki, search the internet, read some man pages, basic debugging, checking error logs, etc. Ergo they're likely help vampires in any case.

To be fair though, searching the wiki, searching the internet, reading some man pages, basic debugging, checking error logs, etc. doesn't require account creation.

ngoonee · 2010-09-10 01:18:23

No it doesn't, but it requires a lot MORE time (IMHO) than registering an account. Even if you're a privacy freak who doesn't want anyone tracking what you're doing online, a simple free throwaway email (gmail, hotmail, etc.), accessed through a proxy does enough to hide your identity.

.:B:. · 2010-09-10 06:11:48

gtklocker wrote:

No, I think it's good.
Someone may only want to report a bug, not to join the forums.

There's nothing good about that. It's not like one login would force you to use any of the other three parts of the community...

Pierre · 2010-09-10 07:04:06

Well, I have written a plugin for the Wiki to use the forums user table (we are using it at archlinux.de). The problem is that there is no way to migrate; so I doubt this will be implemented here.

RaisedFist · 2010-09-10 11:46:06

a different approach would be using OpenID for all four sections of the site (I know it won't happen).

ehlo · 2010-09-10 13:34:17

Makes sense to integrate with the wiki, forum or bugtracker as these are scripts that already have their own user table. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already an addon for user sharing between FluxBB and Mediawiki.

Then custom code would be needed for the bugtracker and AUR. AUR is custom coded so I'm a tad confused as to why it used a separate login to begin with (unless it existed before the forum and wiki?)

As for migration, you can merge users that share a common e-mail and if there is no user in the forum already, create one.

litemotiv · 2010-09-10 13:54:01

ehlo wrote:

Makes sense to integrate with the wiki, forum or bugtracker as these are scripts that already have their own user table. I'd be surprised if there wasn't already an addon for user sharing between FluxBB and Mediawiki.
Then custom code would be needed for the bugtracker and AUR. AUR is custom coded so I'm a tad confused as to why it used a separate login to begin with (unless it existed before the forum and wiki?)
As for migration, you can merge users that share a common e-mail and if there is no user in the forum already, create one.

It's not that simple, each piece of software has a different table structure, security- and authority-model, so you can't just grab X from Y. A simple example is user X being a moderator on site Y, but an administrator on site Z. Even if you can enable this with extra (custom) code, it is prone to error, especially when future updates to any of the software imposes changes to the user structure (in this case any provided upgrade scripts won't work anymore and might need to be custom coded). Either way it's asking for trouble, and probably not worth it if some of your main goals are to keep things vanilla and not introduce hard-to-maintain custom hacks.

There is an OpenID extension for MediaWiki though: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID, so if someone writes one for Flux this will be a big step forwards.

crouse · 2010-09-19 05:40:15

litemotiv wrote:

If you're really going to use Arch you will likely spend hundreds of hours over the next couple of years tweaking and fixing your system, so you could say that the current approach is an excellent first step to weed out the lazy and uninterested.

+10
My thoughts exactly. Not to mention, it makes it slightly more difficult for spammers, which is a good thing, and affects everyone.

chris-kun · 2010-09-19 07:19:53

karol wrote:

wonder wrote:
BasT wrote:
Gives the strong impression of contributions not being valued much.
i don't recall you doing any contributions implementing this stuff. patches welcomed
I think you're aware that's a chicken-egg problem: users don't want to contribute because they feel their contribution are not being valued much and devs would like to see the users participating and not only discussing things. :-)

if everyone adopted this philosophy (waiting for someone else to code it) arch wouldn't even exist. all you're doing is making excuses. almost every contribution in this community has received tremendous amounts of support. saying contributions are unwelcome or unvalued is ridiculous.

codycarey · 2010-09-19 19:37:30

crouse wrote:

litemotiv wrote:
If you're really going to use Arch you will likely spend hundreds of hours over the next couple of years tweaking and fixing your system, so you could say that the current approach is an excellent first step to weed out the lazy and uninterested.
+10
My thoughts exactly. Not to mention, it makes it slightly more difficult for spammers, which is a good thing, and affects everyone.

Honestly, to me that's just a fallacy. When you think about the automation employed by spammers, it's probably less of an annoyance for them than it is for Joe User.

I would love to have a single account associated with all things archlinux.org simply for the convenience of it, but in no way is it a problem. The "overhead" associated with creating multiple accounts is minuscule and is a one time thing for 95% of users. The only major advantage I see of a single sign-on is for the devs in dealing with spammers, ban an account and it's effective across the whole platform.

If people really want such a thing I think they should go to the upstream providers and put in feature requests for OpenID (or a similar system) support and get everyone to upvote it (gaming the system can be a good thing ). That takes the responsibility off the Arch devs so they can continue their dwarven science and eventually improves things for everyone, not just Arch users.

Last edited by codycarey (2010-09-19 19:41:21)

crouse · 2010-09-20 01:25:33

codycarey wrote:

crouse wrote:
litemotiv wrote:
If you're really going to use Arch you will likely spend hundreds of hours over the next couple of years tweaking and fixing your system, so you could say that the current approach is an excellent first step to weed out the lazy and uninterested.
+10
My thoughts exactly. Not to mention, it makes it slightly more difficult for spammers, which is a good thing, and affects everyone.
Honestly, to me that's just a fallacy. When you think about the automation employed by spammers, it's probably less of an annoyance for them than it is for Joe User.

Not a fallacy, I actually do know a little bit about bot automation, and I'd guess that 90% of the Arch userbase is registering only on the forums at first anyway.
Bots are registering at a specific "type" of forum/wiki/etc.

So, what happens when you have a bot that has an openid account..

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-07 09:44:18

4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#2 2010-09-07 10:18:52

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#3 2010-09-07 10:31:13

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#4 2010-09-07 10:32:08

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#5 2010-09-07 10:38:58

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#6 2010-09-07 10:44:17

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#7 2010-09-07 10:56:28

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#8 2010-09-07 11:15:56

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#9 2010-09-07 11:22:35

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#10 2010-09-07 11:32:56

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#11 2010-09-07 12:01:03

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#12 2010-09-07 12:29:46

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#13 2010-09-07 12:41:04

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#14 2010-09-07 13:19:06

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#15 2010-09-10 00:24:14

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#16 2010-09-10 01:18:23

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#17 2010-09-10 06:11:48

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#18 2010-09-10 07:04:06

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#19 2010-09-10 11:46:06

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#20 2010-09-10 13:34:17

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#21 2010-09-10 13:54:01

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#22 2010-09-19 05:40:15

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#23 2010-09-19 07:19:53

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#24 2010-09-19 19:37:30

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

#25 2010-09-20 01:25:33

Re: 4 seperate logins for archlinux.org?

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