Just curious as to why third party sign ups are no longer avaliable, and everyone who did sign up via third parties are now being told to update their profiles emails in order to not potentially lose progress. I’m sure the kinks like duplicate accounts are being worked out as we speak, but I am just wondering why they dropped loging in via third party accounts?
Trying to support logging in through third party applications was what caused the accidental creation of duplicate accounts (and several people a week insisting that their accounts had been deleted).
From @QuincyLarson:
Life pro tip: never offer multiple authentication options on your website or service. This was definitely the biggest mistake I made in setting up freeCodeCamp originally, and it has cost me hundreds of hours of my life, spent trying to explain situations like this to campers, and trying to merge duplicate accounts. Soon our authentication will be fully email-based.
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Thank you very very very much for for the heads up. Saving someones hundreds of hours with simple advice like this is invaluable. I would love to see how the email based authentication for freecodecamp is setup so i can implement something on my site OR help freeCodeCamp with this transition. My main reason for not jumping to the challenge is I don’t know proper security basics when it comes to handling other users logins.
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I can think of at least three reasons not to have FarceBook and birdsite sign-ups on a website.
- It makes you dependent on third parties whose ethics around revenue models and treatment of users are dubious at best.
- It comes across as an endorsement of those companies and their business practices (two words: Cambridge Analytica).
- The code that integrates the third party sign-ups into your site may expose users of your site to tracking and data-mining by those third parties (same with “like” buttons etc).
It seems like a shortcut to getting your site lots of new users quickly, but they’re not really your users. What’s really happening is that you’re reinforcing the idea that it’s normal and necessary for everyone to be a user of proprietary walled gardens like FarceBook, goOgle, and the birdsite.
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Recent events have certainly brought these concerns into the limelight.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the multiple authentication options was ever about increasing the user base. Instead, it was an effort to make life more convenient for FCC’s users by allowing them to have one less password to keep track of.
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