Email as account id
Mar. 23rd, 2006 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackGenerally I like email as identifying my account on a website. I have a couple of email addresses, but can manage to identify one primary one, and it (a) aknowledges that I want to log in with the minimum of fuss (b) avoids having to choose a name that obeys their restrictions (c) yet is easily unique (d) and you have to enter your email *anyway*.
Though I embarassingly discovered a dark side to this approach: I managed to sign up to two amazon accounts with the same email, and it looked like my account history had vanished. I was quite cross with them, until a nice rep emailed and explained what had gone wrong. Then I felt really stupid, though kind of peeved that it had happened.
But I'm not sure what the right approach *is*.
(a) Restrict to one account per email. This is probably simplest, but annoying for places where I would like to keep things separate. I might want a CTS account and my account, but not want to set up a separate email address for the other.
(b) Log in to whichever account's password is given. This is what happened here, and is the quickest to use, but as I found, rather unhelpful. I click on a link saying "leave seller feedback" and it doesn't go anywhere, because I'm logged in to the wrong one.
(c) Allow two accounts, where it has a little drop down list on which you can choose a description you entered (but are not required to retype). This is probably best, but gets as complex as the original sysetm to implement.
What's best?
ETA: For that matter, could we have a unified email authentication scheme? My email account could be integrated with a little list of sites that have requested me to confirm that I signed up to them, initially via a standard email layout, later via some less profligate protocol, and I could hit 'ok' to them all quickly. And my browser could have a 'confirm' button plugin that did it automatically after I filled in the form :)
Though I embarassingly discovered a dark side to this approach: I managed to sign up to two amazon accounts with the same email, and it looked like my account history had vanished. I was quite cross with them, until a nice rep emailed and explained what had gone wrong. Then I felt really stupid, though kind of peeved that it had happened.
But I'm not sure what the right approach *is*.
(a) Restrict to one account per email. This is probably simplest, but annoying for places where I would like to keep things separate. I might want a CTS account and my account, but not want to set up a separate email address for the other.
(b) Log in to whichever account's password is given. This is what happened here, and is the quickest to use, but as I found, rather unhelpful. I click on a link saying "leave seller feedback" and it doesn't go anywhere, because I'm logged in to the wrong one.
(c) Allow two accounts, where it has a little drop down list on which you can choose a description you entered (but are not required to retype). This is probably best, but gets as complex as the original sysetm to implement.
What's best?
ETA: For that matter, could we have a unified email authentication scheme? My email account could be integrated with a little list of sites that have requested me to confirm that I signed up to them, initially via a standard email layout, later via some less profligate protocol, and I could hit 'ok' to them all quickly. And my browser could have a 'confirm' button plugin that did it automatically after I filled in the form :)