WordPress.com button is going away from login/signup screens

Question

If you are not currently using WordPress credentials to sign in, you can safely ignore this post. Otherwise, read on...

Wordpress.com has retired OpenID support for blogs created after January 2, 2016. Blogs created before then should still be usable as OpenID credentials, but even then, the support has been getting more and more brittle over the years. In particular, if you have a custom domain for your wordpress.com blog, you can't use that blog to sign in to Stack Exchange. Why? Not entirely sure, to be honest. There's a redirect somewhere that's busted, and as far as I can tell the issue isn't on our end at this point.

With this in mind, we're removing the WordPress button from the login and signup UI to avoid even implying that WordPress is a viable option for signing in if you haven't already:

If you are currently able to log in using WordPress credentials, they will continue to work for as long as WordPress supports them. To log in with your existing WordPress credentials, enter your blog URL into the freeform OpenID field. I strongly encourage you to consider adding another credential as a backup option as well, or at least make sure you have a valid email set in your profile to enable account recovery.

These changes took effect on Monday, November 21, 2016, and are now live.

Answer 1

Based on the reasons given, it sounds like a reasonable step to remove WordPress as a standard selection option (although with a less than optimal short notice!).

However, having to type in something manually each time will be a pain, so I would suggest that you replace the button with a "My Favorite OpenID Provider" button, which then fills in a user configurable setting.

This will make the issue of What OpenID providers should we feature on the login page? much less of an issue because it would more or less only affect people using OpenID the very first time. This will benefit all non-default selection OpenID users, not just WordPress.

Logic something like the following:

if (login_method == openid && !user_settings.contains(favourite_openid_provider)
{
   answer = ask("Do you want to save " + sanitize(url) + " as your favorite...")
   if (answer == yes)
   {
       user_settings.save(favourite_openid_provider, url)
   }
}

Answer 2

If you set up your account with WordPress OpenID like I did and want to create a regular Stack Exchange OpenID (a.k.a. "log in with email") for your account, follow these directions.

You can also follow these directions to add another OpenID, such as Google or Facebook, to your account.

Theoretically, you can have as many OpenIDs and email logins associated with your account as you want.

Answer 3

What about inferring the OpenID URL from the e-mail address itself?

When an e-mail [email protected] is entered, a request to the site is made in the background to see if the page includes the required OpenID elements, and if so, allow to use it right away by clicking on the login button without filling in the OpenID URL explicitly?

That would make it a lot easier to use a custom OpenID.

Answer 4

I guess 2000 people discovering the button for their login method (WordPress) is gone and not knowing how to work-around that, and not knowing if that login method is just somehow no longer supported at all, could end up to be a support issue.

I'd suggest that at least for a while (indefinitely), add a note (and link) below the remaining login buttons like: "Looking for the WordPress OpenID login button? Click here for the story".