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Re: How do we fix the Launchpad's login experience?

 

On September 24, 2010, William Grant wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-09-24 at 00:38 -0400, Elliot Murphy wrote:
> > I'm really glad to see this being discussed in detail.
> > 
> > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 7:18 PM, William Grant <me@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> 
> > I use
> > https://launchpad.net/~statik/ to login via openID to various 3rd
> > party sites such as stackoverflow.com. Is this going to stop working
> > ?(I won't complain if it does, just trying to understand)
> 
> That's the XRDS coming into play. If you look at the HTML, you'll see
> elements delegating the page's identity to login.launchpad.net.
> login.launchpad.net and login.ubuntu.com are real OpenID providers,
> while Launchpad just has a couple of tags that delegate.
> 
> This XRDS dates from the days when LP was an OpenID provider, and there
> was no other URL to use. It could probably be deprecated, perhaps with
> newly-created profiles not providing the delegation tags.

The plan was once we support arbitrary OpenID provider, we would let you 
choose to which identity your profile identity is delegated. With probably a 
default option of no delegation. (A feature stolen from Sourceforge :-)


> 
> > > In summary: fix bug #637968, make LP a general RP, destroy
> > > login.launchpad.net.
> > 
> > This sounds like a good summary, although I would like to understand
> > why is making LP a general RP a necessary step?
> 
> As above: we don't want to scare more people off LP. Forcing everyone
> through somewhere with heavy Ubuntu branding is going to scare more
> people off.
> 

That was the working assumption when we rebranded the SSO site to Ubuntu (and 
not Canonical).

It might be argued though, that people who object to using Launchpad because 
of the Ubuntu SSO login wouldn't use it anyway because of the Canonical/Ubuntu 
link. 

Said differently: we assumed the difference between the set of people who 
won't use Launchpad with a Ubuntu-branded SSO and the set of people who won't 
use Launchpad is non-empty.

A different assumption is that these two sets are identical and the difference 
is empty.

We could test this assumption by sending an email to all Lauchpad users 
stating our intention of using the Ubuntu SSO in a month, what it means for 
them, what is the change they are going to see... and counting the number of 
people who scream :-)


-- 

Francis J. Lacoste
francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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