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I just finally logged in for the first time on Data.SE and thus created an account there. The actual account creation took place at 17:46:37 GMT. Now here's what my profile turned out like:

Huh?

  1. Does Data.SE not pull in information from my other accounts? I used my Google OpenID to login which is linked (along with many others) to my main SE account. waffles should fix this

  2. Ummm, 7 hours? Where did it come up with this number? According to this page, I registered at 3/28/2012 10:46:37 AM. Is that my time or something? How does 22:46 to 17:46 ever create 7? I'm so confused. When I refresh my profile, it becomes 7 hours, 2 minutes. That 2 minutes part is accurate!

  3. The URL in the openid field gets cutoff at the bottom. I just figured while I was here reporting a bug I'd throw that in.

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    According to waffles, "Data SE does not participate in [the SE] global auth scheme. It predated it and our Stack Exchange identity scheme does not have public endpoints. / As it stands, Data SE tries to guess a login for you from your OpenID provider, if it fails it assigns you a unique jon.doe login." – Pops Mar 28 '12 at 18:01
  • @Popular: What does "tries to guess" mean? It can't guess that from animuson@gmail I'd want my display name to be animuson? o.o – animuson♦ Mar 28 '12 at 18:02
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    Also, Data SE doesn't have full support for cyborg users. – Pops Mar 28 '12 at 18:03
  • @animuson - That just means it doesn't "guess" very well. – cdeszaq Mar 28 '12 at 18:17
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    Since you used a Google OpenId and it returns a unique hash to our site, we couldn't determine a starting point for what your name should be (Google also doesn't return real name to us). There is no way we would expose your email as your display name. – Jarrod Dixon♦ Mar 28 '12 at 18:58
  • Waffles, Rebecca or Tim Stone will have to speak more about the other issues (or check out the source for yourself :) – Jarrod Dixon♦ Mar 28 '12 at 18:59
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As Popular Demand mentioned, Data Explorer makes no attempt to link your account there to your Stack Exchange account. Now that the API 2.0 allows for authentication, it's possible that Data Explorer could see if you were a particular Stack Exchange user and do something useful with that information, but I'm not sure if there's any benefit to that to warrant the extra verification step.

That aside, the reason you ended up as a jon.doe is because I believe Google doesn't return the Nickname information that's ask for when the OpenID request is made, and Data Explorer defaults to a jon.doe+id username if this value isn't provided. I think there was a point in time where in this situation the login was derived from the returned email address, but that had privacy implications and was removed.

I can't see anything in particular that would account for the date issue , save you either having tried to login much earlier or a freak incident where the server's time got wildly thrown off (and I don't think that happened). I'll take another look at the code to see if there's any other explanation, though. except for the fact that it wasn't actually saving the intended UTC creation date and was defaulting to the current local time instead. Whoops!

As for the minor display issue, I'll fix that up when I have time to work on it a bit later tonight.

Update: Pushed an update for the time issue, and another for the display issue.

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