Introducing our new Sign up Process

Dav

Hello all,

Today we're really happy to be launching a feature which we've had requests for for some time - you can now sign up (and log in) to Boards with your Google, Facebook or Twitter accounts - functionality you see all across the web and what has quickly become the standard means of account creation on web platforms like ours. It looks like this:



Nothing major has changed - pick a username and agree to the Terms and Conditions as well as the Privacy policy - just as we do now. Of course, you'll see the 4 buttons below that asking you to use one of those 4 choices to complete your account sign-up.

When you pick Facebook or Google, your email address associated with your account is passed back to Boards and gets filled in and a random password is created. You won't need to know this as being logged in with whichever service you chose will be your means to log in in the future. Here are the authorisation screens for both Facebook and Google respectively.



Twitter works slightly differently, it doesn't pass us an email address, but everything else is the same as Facebook or Google. So after you give Twitter your permission to share details with Boards, you will be asked to submit an email address.



Will Boards be posting things on my timeline?
No, this is only for identification and verification purposes, we won't be posting things on your timeline on any of those services.

What if I don't have any one of those things?
You can still enter an email address as we've always done and a verification email will be sent to that address to confirm it is correct.



If the email address associated with your Facebook or Google accounts is already in use, or the email address you enter after Twitter verification or thought plain old Email sign-up is in use, you'll see the following error message:



Once you've completed those stages, you will be shown another new feature, we ask you want you're interested in so we can populate your "Followed Forums" list with some relevant communities for you to join. These are based on our most popular current forums and communities.



Pick at least 3, but you can pick more if you like and you'll be registered and ready for action.

This may not seem like a huge amount of work to you all, but none of this hangs off VBulletin, which means we're yet another step closer to having total platform control. The design is responsive so appears the same on a mobile device or desktop.

What about me, I've already got an account, how can I log in with these things?
If you've given the same email address to Facebook or Google, you can log out, press the new Login Button, click on whichever service that has the same email address as your Boards account and it'll ask for authorisation as above and then log you straight into the site as normal. It does not change your existing password. It's not working with Twitter yet - the awkwardness of not passing an email over and back as a part of the auth process means we're still working on that.

So we hope to not only make it easier to sign up to the site, but to make it easier to find the right place to have a chat for new people who find forums a mystery.

I'm sure there are questions, fire ahead!

pwurple

Why does the google plus login need to pull in the list of people in your circles?

Akrasia

Is this new method of sign-up the only way new users can join Boards.ie or is the old signup process still functioning?

I ask because
1. Not everyone uses facebook/google +
2. Not everyone wants their boards profile to be linked in any way to facebook other social media (eg, if you're boards.ie account is used to discuss a hobby or lifestyle or political/religious belief that the user doesn't want his/her family/friends/work collegues to know about
3. People tend to distrust services that ask for permissions that can allow a third party application to post on their behalf to social media

And on to question 2. Will Boards.ie be able to post messages to facebook/twitter/google + on behalf of the user?

SEPT 23 1989

Why the sheep?

Spear

Akrasia wrote: »

Is this new method of sign-up the only way new users can join Boards.ie or is the old signup process still functioning?

I ask because
1. Not everyone uses facebook/google +
2. Not everyone wants their boards profile to be linked in any way to facebook other social media (eg, if you're boards.ie account is used to discuss a hobby or lifestyle or political/religious belief that the user doesn't want his/her family/friends/work collegues to know about
3. People tend to distrust services that ask for permissions that can allow a third party application to post on their behalf to social media

And on to question 2. Will Boards.ie be able to post messages to facebook/twitter/google + on behalf of the user?

You can see the old fashioned email signup option on the images.

Dav

pwurple wrote: »

Why does the google plus login need to pull in the list of people in your circles?

I believe that's the default from G+, but it can be changed by you - see below.

Akrasia wrote: »

Is this new method of sign-up the only way new users can join Boards.ie or is the old signup process still functioning?

I ask because
1. Not everyone uses facebook/google +
2. Not everyone wants their boards profile to be linked in any way to facebook other social media (eg, if you're boards.ie account is used to discuss a hobby or lifestyle or political/religious belief that the user doesn't want his/her family/friends/work collegues to know about
3. People tend to distrust services that ask for permissions that can allow a third party application to post on their behalf to social media

And on to question 2. Will Boards.ie be able to post messages to facebook/twitter/google + on behalf of the user?

I answered all of these questions in the first post - we won't be posting to your accounts and you can still use email if you don't have one of these accounts as we've been doing for years.

The social media accounts login is entirely optional and potentially quicker for some people who want to just get stuck in without faffing about with email authentication etc. We lose a lot of people signing up between registering and verifying their email address.

As for trust - I don't disagree which is why, if you look at the images I've show, it specifically says it won't be posting anything and the permission Boards is seeking doesn't allow for that.

Google's default settings are somehow different - if you see the image above, there are pencil icons beside the first 2 options. If you click them you can set it to have none of your circles selected and "Only You" to the second option which means that it'll never post to your timeline or show people that your account is tied to a Boards.ie login. I am looking to see if we can set it up this way by default, but it might just be the way Google presents this to us and we may not have any say in that. I'll come back later today with more info as soon as I have it.

Using these services as log-in authentication is common all across the web, we're far from the first to adopt it.

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

Why the sheep?

We're putting together a list of photos actually, it'll show a random one every time when we get that rolled out (although we might theme it depending on the time of year).

KomradeBishop

I got a login issue for a number of minutes there, giving me the error "The CSRF token is invalid. Please try to resubmit the form." - this was preventing me from logging in at all, though is working now.

It might be a good idea to enable anonymous posting on either Help Desk or Site Development, as if other users have similar issues with logging in, they won't have a way to make a post reporting the issue.

foggy_lad

log-in process used to be a single click from the link at the right side of the page but now it involves going to a new log-in page and logging in there. Takes longer and seems awkward/clunky.

Dav

KomradeBishop wrote: »

I got a login issue for a number of minutes there, giving me the error "The CSRF token is invalid. Please try to resubmit the form." - this was preventing me from logging in at all, though is working now.

It might be a good idea to enable anonymous posting on either Help Desk or Site Development, as if other users have similar issues with logging in, they won't have a way to make a post reporting the issue.

We caught that bug ourselves and it's been sorted. We still have the "Contact Us" link on the bottom (which people used thankfully when this cropped up) .

foggy_lad wrote: »

log-in process used to be a single click from the link at the right side of the page but now it involves going to a new log-in page and logging in there. Takes longer and seems awkward/clunky.

Yea, fair point, I'm looking to see if it can be a "pop over" so there's one less page load. I think the front page looks better without the "log in" section being duplicated under the links that were there before and an overwhelming majority of our members stay logged in, so don't need it as often. Your point remains though, I'll see what we can do about it.