Phil Dreizen

Comments on this site essentially stopped working because of a lack of support for OpenID in general and the deprecation of the OpenID 2.0 standard specifically. OpenID is (or was?) an open standard for authentication, and allowed you to log into websites using just one URL that that was hosted by an "OpenID provider." There were OpenID providers like myopenid for those who knew what OpenID was. But large companies like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook also acted as providers, hiding the underlying technology, allowing users to log in with their already existing accounts.

What was nice about OpenID was that I didn't need to ask users to create an identity on my site. They just used their identity from somewhere else. And because it was an open standard, I didn't need to write code for each provider.

It seems since I last actively used this site, OpenID 2.0 was dropped, replaced with OpenID Connect. Besides Google, I can't seem to find anything that uses OpenID Connect. (I could be wrong about this, but it sure is hidden). And even Google prefers you use their "Google Sign-In" over OpenID Connect.

Of course, you see "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in With Facebook" all over the web. But it seems to me that if I want people to be able to sign in with Google,Facebook or anything else, I have to handle each case separately. Which is really annoying.

In any case, until I do something about the situation, I have to disable comments.