Blog Documentation Book a Demo
Please upgrade here. These earlier versions are no longer being updated and have security issues.
HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.

Converting a Twitter acct into a "real" acct

clarklabclarklab
edited February 2011 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8
Curious about the process of signing in with Twitter. When a user logs in with Twitter (or FB), is the user given a full, "real" forum account? The next time they return to the forum, do they have to click the Twitter button?

I ask because I figured you'd be able to login with Twitter, then change your password, and upon next visit to the site you could sign on as a "real" user (with user/pass instead of Twitter Auth) but this doesn't seem to be the case. When you try to change your password, it still asks for the "old" password, even though there isn't one.

What do I need to do in order to allow people to transfer their social accounts into "real" forum accounts? For instance, on these forums (vanillaforums.org), I first signed in with Twitter. Now each time I visit, I'm unsure if I should click Sign In or the Twitter icon. Just feels like odd user flow.
Tagged:

Comments

  • dbinojdbinoj New
    Yeah, I too have the same doubt here...
  • ddumontddumont ✭✭
    The admin can assign one.

    There was an error rendering this rich post.

  • ShadowdareShadowdare MVP
    I believe it creates a real account but it's not synced.

    Add Pages to Vanilla with the Basic Pages app

  • clarklabclarklab
    @ddumont I'd much prefer the user be able to set it. I can't be asked to change the password for each user that signs up. The way Plancast does it is pretty nice, after Twitter auth it asks the user to enter their email and a password, thus creating a permanent account.

    @Shadowdare what do you mean synced? like content between Twitter and VF? I wasn't really expecting that. I just want a user to be able to click the Twitter button on their first visit, but sign in with a "real" account on their second.
  • clarklabclarklab
    If it makes you feel any better, Vanilla, most sites have this problem and I've only recently become aware of it. There doesn't seem to be a standard way of doing it. It all falls back to the question: When the user returns for a second visit, which button do they push?
  • leafboxtealeafboxtea New
    @clarklab I found out the answer to this the hard way. Last week, when the Vanilla support forums went down they rebuilt them. But they took a couple days to activate the features and the Twitter signon wasn't readily available.

    After I had originally signed in using Twitter, I had updated my email address (Twitter doesn't pass an email, so Vanilla defaults to using the foo.com placeholder). Because my correct email was in the system, I was able to request a password reset. After that I could signin using either my email address or, (later when they turned twitter login back on) my twitter account.

    The point here is, as long as your users have updated their email address in your system, they can reset their password allowing them to signin without Twitter. It might be worth posting a public message on your forum notifying users to ensure their email address is correct so they can receive notifications properly (those notifications are a great feature, and selling it that way is a good way to collect email addresses).
  • clarklabclarklab
    @leafboxtea I'll do that. a reset is better than nothing, I guess- overall I would really prefer it just be properly built into the user flow.

    I'm noticing that most Twitter / FB login systems only benefit the hit-and-run user, someone you might not want around anyway. Most systems make it really hard for a Twitter user to become a "real" user, which seems essentially flawed.

    I'll go ahead and use your method though here at VanillaForums.org though, I've wanted to convert my account since I first signed up.
Sign In or Register to comment.