What do you prefer, authentication using e-mail or username

[Knitter]

Now that the mighty forum is alive , a poll for everyone.

Currently Sandscape uses the e-mail and password for authentication but it was mentioned that that's not a natural or common option and that, instead, authentication should be made using the username and password combination.

I have absolutely no preference and would like to solve it with some votes, so please vote away.

Regards,

Knitter

[snowdrop]

Forum has too small amount of users, and one might question what popularity really means anyways.

What's more interesting is how one would argue for/against each option... I know people used to logi with their emails like i the 90's and it may get some popularity given FB and some other have adopted it, but I can't figure out a good reason for why one would do it since the person - in our case - would still need/want to also setup a nickname as a username in the preferences to NOT display the email in public as a username. Many times people also have their real names as email, and it would make it an even worse idea to use it then.

[Q_x]

One can still use his e-mil as an username.
Also OpenID. Non-registered approach might work best, like IRC has - optional registration that is. Plenty of options there are, not just two. We might even use IRC servers on their own, if there will be any troubles when writing servers.

[Knitter]

I know that the forum has a small number of registered users, and even a smaller one of active users, but the issue was raised and I feel that, thought small as it may be, it's something that is worth asking. I'm not developing this for myself

Currently, the name is just a display name, it is used for nothing else then to show a friendlier name in the interface, what identifies a user, beyond the ID, is the user's e-mail and password combination.

The poll will run for about 6 more days an I'll update the trac issue with the result.

Regards,

Knitter

[snowdrop]

Today I actually came across one single useful thing with having e-mail based login - you won't forget it. lol. Else people are forced to use bullshit nicknames sometimes, like Nick627 or Anna__, which are both just varaitions of their real nicknames Nick / Anna. If each and every site they register on forces them to use variations they will easily forget where they used each variation. Then again, that's mostly a result of their poor imagination: My "real" nick has never been taken, ever anywhere. I've used it for like 10 years now and it is both short, readable and lacks numbers and other foonky signs (and no, obviously not it's not "snowdrop").

What's interesting here is that the user has to fill in both types of info no matter what: Email will be needed for automated password recovery etc, username to have something short and nicely formatted, usable in client.

Qx has a point that the user could choose to use her email as username, but, that would result in very ugly looking usernames inside the client.

[xarn]

I personally don't care, both are Ok.

[aspidites]

Why not just do like other websites do and allow either?

That is, usernames and emails must be unique and are matched against a password.

[xarn]

+1
This last proposal sounds the best to me, and is straightforward.

I also like the idea of non-registered accounts but this may add some difficulties.

[Knitter]

That could be a good compromise, allowing for both the username and the e-mail is an easy change.

As for playing without registration, I've thought about it briefly but since decks, games and stats need some user identification I don't think it could be done, at least there would need to be some sort of unique ID to identify users that want to be featured in stats.

I will add the idea of anonymous play to the tracker so that it's not lost.

[aspidites]

Well, its not an elegant solution, but perhaps you could just generate a pseudo-UID for anonymous log in?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1050 ... javascript