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Back in October 26th 2018, SE project manager wrote:

Currently, https://openid.stackexchange.com/ is still on the internet, but we are in the process of completely removing it

It's still on the internet, over two and half years later. I don't have any problem with it, but just wonder why Joe wrote it, and unless he was misled somehow, how long it really takes to remove it.

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    In theory, if SE used the scream test... About 10 minutes. I would guess they don't use the scream test to see what will break if it's removed 😁 - more precisely I think it's good to ask what still relies on it. That's to say, it's probably not about the subdomain, it's about the service behind it – Journeyman Geek♦ Apr 5 at 7:29
  • They needed it for SEDE login so they couldn't remove it right away then. Presumably they forgot about it... – Glorfindel Apr 5 at 7:45
  • Maybe some souls still use it to auth against it? – rene Apr 5 at 7:48
  • @rene doubt it's still working, if so it's pretty major glitch, not to say security breach as it's no longer maintained, at all. – Shadow The Vaccinated Wizard Apr 5 at 8:08
  • Still works for KennyBot. I have even logged in on Feb 11 at 8:30 and Mar 25 at 13:38 based on the History table. By the looks of it when I ran tests from Glitch. – rene Apr 5 at 8:13
  • @rene huh. So weird. – Shadow The Vaccinated Wizard Apr 5 at 8:15
  • Maybe I do something stupid on MSE chat, or use a deprecated route there causing the login on openid. – rene Apr 5 at 8:19
  • I can ask about this - is there any concerns for breaking things like bots ( @rene ?) if we do remove it? We were using it for SEDE until August but that should have been handled. – Catija♦ Apr 5 at 13:58
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    It's not as simple as "just removing a subdomain" though. There are some admin-only tools that we need to have access to and still only exist on that site. Until they can be migrated to a more accessible place, there's not a lot of removing the subdomain that we can do. Also, saying it's not maintained is not entirely accurate. Every email/password credential on our network is still technically an "OpenID" credential and will work on that site. You can even still change your per-email password there. It's all the same system. – animuson♦ Apr 5 at 14:03
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    @Catija the login code for Kenny is like HandleSuccess in the SE code base. I've no idea why it works ... I think most bot owners did some re-work last year when the chat login moved on-site. I think I see logins from Kenny due to the tight coupling of those login systems, as explained by Animuson. – rene Apr 5 at 14:39
  • @Catija I've checked the paths I use and none of those use openid.stackexchange.com and I can login by relying on the login forms and redirects offered by the chat / SE sites. I've done a search in the code base of Smokey and they have moved away from openid by the looks of it in 2018. So no blockers on that end but I've asked Makyen to confirm. – rene Apr 5 at 20:11
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    @Catija SmokeDetector uses the ChatExchange library to communicate with SE Chat. Work was done in 2018 to remove primary dependence on openid.stackexchange.com. However, it looks like there's code still there to handle a prompt in the response received from meta.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow.com which mentions https://openid.stackexchange.com/account/prompt. If that prompt exists, then it will POST to https://openid.stackexchange.com/account/prompt/submit – Makyen Apr 5 at 20:42
  • I haven't previously looked at this part of the code. From how it's written, I'd assume that the prompt it's looking for is something which doesn't show up all the time, and may have been eliminated by SE. I have not actually investigated what the responses which the code is getting look like. I'd need to do more investigation to see if that's something which can/should be removed at this point. It may already be effectively inoperative if SE no longer serves that prompt under any conditions. – Makyen Apr 5 at 20:46
  • @animuson well, Joe said it is in progress... so can you tell where it stands? SE still plans to remove that sub domain, or did you (SE the company) gave up on that idea? – Shadow The Vaccinated Wizard Apr 6 at 8:09
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    @Shadow It is in progress, and I don't know anything about its current state. But the work required is more than just removing a subdomain as is implied by the title. There are plenty of things being worked on that seem simple and I would love to be complete because they would make my job easier (like that pesky Email field on the User table). But alas, I would rather these things be done the right way so they do actually make my job easier rather than making my job much more difficult. – animuson♦ Apr 6 at 15:10

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