LiveJournal commenter authentication

Filed under: Journaling
6 Comments

LiveJournal users can now authenticate (to post comments on my older entries without a delay) by entering their LJ usernames in the comment form.

(So far I've only set this up on the individual-entry pages. Once I'm sure it works, I'll add it to the popup window comments-only pages as well.)

Thanks much to Mark Pasc(?)'s excellent OpenID Comments for Movable Type plugin, version 1.6.1, which not only allows OpenID authentication but also has a special case for LJ.

If any of you are using OpenID but are not using LJ, lemme know; I could also provide a general OpenID signin form. But I suspect that at least 99% of the people who are likely to comment here and who use OpenID at all are using LJ.

Note to LJ users who have no idea what I'm talking about: LJ automatically provides you with an OpenID page. So all you have to do is enter your LJ username in the text box when you want to enter a comment on one of my older entries; you don't need to know anything at all about OpenID.

6 Responses to “LiveJournal commenter authentication”

  1. logisticslad

    Let’s see if this works…

  2. Shmuel

    Cool! Giving it a try here…

  3. Twig

    Cool!

    🙂

  4. Aliette de Bodard

    Cool, long live LJ 😉

  5. sairuh

    Okay, I know this entry is over a year old, but I’ve recently been researching OpenID authentication for my own blog. It turns out that there are so many OpenID providers! It’s rather surprising (at least to me), but considering this, wouldn’t it be better to provide a more general OpenID signin form in the future? (Obviously, it’s your blog of course. I’m just wearing my “generalize and abstract for as many cases” hat.)

    What would be useful (and interesting) is to get an idea as to how many users there are per OpenID provider. I imagine LJ has the lion’s share, but with such a big list of providers, one shouldn’t disregard everyone else (in the longterm).

    On a related note, Will Norris (a developer for OpenID authentication and delegation plugins for WordPress) has a nice OpenID provider wishlist. It showed me some important aspects to consider when choosing one, like SSL connections for login.

  6. Jed

    IIrc, the reason I didn’t provide a general OpenID signin form is that that would require everyone who wanted to sign in with OpenID (including LJ users) to provide a full URL. I figured that (a) almost nobody who reads my journal uses OpenID except indirectly via LJ, and (b) a bunch of LJ users do read my journal, and (c) LJ users are more likely to sign in if they can do so by entering their LJ username rather than by having to enter their whole LJ URL.

    Maybe I should modify the OpenID Comments plugin, so that in non-LJ mode, if someone enters something that looks like a username instead of a URL, it assumes LJ. That would probably be the best option, but I’m unlikely to get around to doing it anytime soon.

    (It’s possible OpenID Comments already does that; that would be cool. But I’m unlikely to get around to even looking into that anytime soon.)

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