rpx openid service - can invision use or do this ?

[sound]

mentioned this service being used by tweetfeed in another thread


after looking at it all a bit deeper, was wondering can invision take advantage of this service or method

either by providing a similar service in future(ideally) or by forums using the actual rpxnow service ?

https://rpxnow.com

[bfarber]

I actually looked into integrating this at one point. The only thing that "turned me off" was that each user would individually need to go set their own key to setup RPX. We've got other services now (Facebook Connect, Windows Live, etc.) that work that way now, so it's not as big an issue.

[sound]

Given the annoucement of central licencing keys and recent features such as live chat, anti-spam which use similar methods yep ?
Could invision not provide a similar service ?
As it would be inhouse it would be then fully intergrated and so would work straight out of the box.
Which could be both a very usefull feature and a very good selling point!
Given the amount of invision forums and so possible users, invision could even develop into a major openid provider if there was such a desire

if not feasable, could the rsx service be added as similar sort of service to existing logins already built in ?

[John Beutler]

I actually looked into integrating this at one point. The only thing that "turned me off" was that each user would individually need to go set their own key to setup RPX. We've got other services now (Facebook Connect, Windows Live, etc.) that work that way now, so it's not as big an issue.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this statement. From an end-user experience POV, RPX is actually quite seamless...the user simply clicks on one of the authentication providers (Yahoo, Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc.), they are taken through the "authentication flow" (same as if they connected with FB Connect), and redirected back to a page that the RPX was configured to redirect back to. That page would most likely be a registration form that is pre-populated with the authentication information pulled from the Authenticating website. Again, that is done behind the scenes at the server level, what the user would experience is a registration page with pre-filled data that they can either change OR click through. The only key's that are involved are within the RPX setup for each application that REQUIRES a unique "application", such as Facebook. In that case, you have to create an application and provide RPX the "API Key", but the end-user never does that the site developer would do that configuration!

If you have any more questions, feel free to shoot me an email.

John Beutler
Solution Engineer
JanRain, Inc.
johnb@janrain.com

[Wolfie]

Could invision not provide a similar service ?

Do you mean for IPS to become part of the OpenID market, where someone could use their IPS details to join/sign-in to other sites?

[Matt]

I'm not really sure what you mean by this statement. From an end-user experience POV, RPX is actually quite seamless...the user simply clicks on one of the authentication providers (Yahoo, Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc.), they are taken through the "authentication flow" (same as if they connected with FB Connect), and redirected back to a page that the RPX was configured to redirect back to. That page would most likely be a registration form that is pre-populated with the authentication information pulled from the Authenticating website. Again, that is done behind the scenes at the server level, what the user would experience is a registration page with pre-filled data that they can either change OR click through. The only key's that are involved are within the RPX setup for each application that REQUIRES a unique "application", such as Facebook. In that case, you have to create an application and provide RPX the "API Key", but the end-user never does that the site developer would do that configuration!

If you have any more questions, feel free to shoot me an email.

John Beutler

Solution Engineer

JanRain, Inc.

johnb@janrain.com

John, thanks for signing up and posting that. I appreciate it. Brandon simply meant that back when we added OpenID integration, we did it as a "log in module" so it was chained with our other authentication methods. At that time, we felt asking the admin to go and set up their own RPX account, etc was a step too much. However, since then, we've added Twitter and Facebook integration that require the admin to do just that.

We'll definitely look at RPX again. It seems like a good solution but we'll likely do that in a future point release as we're just wrapping 3.1 now.

[bfarber]

John, thanks for signing up and posting that. I appreciate it. Brandon simply meant that back when we added OpenID integration, we did it as a "log in module" so it was chained with our other authentication methods. At that time, we felt asking the admin to go and set up their own RPX account, etc was a step too much. However, since then, we've added Twitter and Facebook integration that require the admin to do just that.

We'll definitely look at RPX again. It seems like a good solution but we'll likely do that in a future point release as we're just wrapping 3.1 now.

Right, exactly. I wasn't referring to the end user, I was referring to the site administrator. But again, since that point we've added services that require just this sort of thing (i.e. Facebook Connect) so, for lack of a better term, this barrier is less of a concern at this stage than it was when I originally investigated RPX.

For what it's worth, I did send off an email to JanRain to discuss perhaps creating a generic key that all IPB users could use out of the box, but then if they wanted to utilize any service that required a special key, they'd have to go to JanRain's site to create their own. This would be the best of both worlds in my mind - any IPB admin would be able to use RPX out of the box without any special setup, but they would still be able to use the more advanced login methods offered by RPX by signing up for their own personal key. I didn't hear back from whomever I emailed at JanRain about this, however.