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There are probably many aspects to this but the one I'm thinking about currently is how a member's identity is portrayed. I imagine different communities will have different requirements. In some, anonymity may be important, even crucial. In others, "real names" may be beneficial and even desired - particularly if establishing oneself as an authority in a field is desirable. I'd love to hear some dialogue about this and see if certain administrative options could be cooked into an OSQA install. For one project I'm considering using OSQA for, I'd like a way of requiring a Real Name - perhaps even channeling account creation through Facebook or LinkedIn as a means of verifying identity - and then portraying Real Names on the site as opposed to user handles. |
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We will soon be moving our OSQA site to an all login-with-linkedin model for this very reason. We're evaluating a couple of different implementation options right now. I'll share some of the rationale here, to keep the discussion rolling. Why we are moving to real identityOur community (www.careervillage.org) allows high school students to ask career questions and enables working professionals in those careers to answer these questions. Unlike many Q&A sites, the answers we gather are often subjective. We have two strong reasons for moving to real identity: (1) to establish the credibility of the professional answering the question (especially in the context where there may not be a "right" answer), and (2) to protect the students on the site by discouraging inappropriate behavior. Why we selected LinkedIn as our sole auth providerWe evaluated several third parties -- facebook, twitter, and linkedin were the front-runners because they had sufficient scale among our answerers (we are somewhat unique in that questioners and answerers do not overlap for our community, by design). We felt that using facebook as the primary auth would not convey a sense of professionalism. We felt that twitter did not provide "real identity" validation. In addition, LinkedIn has other key information we need like career path and areas of expertise. As a result, we've selected LinkedIn as the required auth method, and we will be supporting facebook and twitter as optional account additions to enable some bonus features on facebook and twitter. What data we plan to use from LinkedIn
@jac, you've probably got the right idea. That's one of the reasons we have LinkedIn support built directly into our professional Qato product. It looks like CareerVillage is providing a really positive non-profit service to help people. Feel free to get in touch with me, and I can probably get you set up with a free Qato system.
(31 Mar, 07:23)
rickross ♦♦
@rickross: Thanks so much for that offer. I'll definitely follow up with you on that, once I figure out your contact info.
(01 Apr, 08:28)
jac
good answer
(03 Apr, 07:55)
ticktack
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From a technical perspective, I've already patched OSQA to optionally display real names instead of screen names and fetch the user's fullname: If you're consolidating to a single, trusted source for identity, you'd need to further customise the provisioning process so users don't get the opportunity to change the field values - maybe as simple as setting the fields on auth/complete.html to read only so they can only confirm their details before signup (that's what I'm doing internally with CrowdID auth). Hello Danny, I just followed the instructions on http://jira.osqa.net/browse/OSQA-828 (I did not implement or know what 663 is for). After uploading all the new files and restarting I had a couple of 500 errors related to "IndentationError: unexpected indent" as pointed out by my OSQA log file. I suppose as a result of copy and pasting. Once I got these sorted out and the site came back up, I find that only Facebook and Twitter have been left as authentication providers, and Gmail, Yahoo, OpenID, and all the little others have been removed or do not show anymore. Is this a result of omitting to implement 663 or is it just the way these mod is intended to work? I know many of my users login through Google so I would want to enable that option back up. I won't revert the changes made just yet in hopes I hear from you. If you'd like to see the site's login page it's: http://respuest.as/cuenta/entrar/ Thank you for sharing this work with us!
(11 Apr, 11:21)
netk
You're welcome! Glad to have people getting the benefit of my work. 828 has landed in SVN, so you may be better off taking SVN trunk - you have to be particularly careful with white space in Python, indentation is used in the same way languages like C use braces. Otherwise, these changes should just work; the patch is intended to have no other dependencies. Double check the django log at startup, you'll probably find the module is still failing to load. The other issue is actually 663, typo in my original post. It adds a setting to allow real name to be displayed instead of the screen name.
(11 Apr, 18:41)
Danny Thomas
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I believe requiring a Real Name is becoming more important, almost a must, for some types of communities. I think having an alias makes it easier to feel less of a feeling of accountability since your reputation is not tied to your real name. So it brings me to raise these questions:
I would like to hire a developer from oDesk to do this, but I would like to know if should be a module, or editing the core, or if something like this has already been done? If any of the developers could give us some pointers, it would be really useful and helpful in hiring someone otherwise unfamiliar with this project. Thank you. Invstigating I've found this: http://meta.osqa.net/questions/5722/can-osqa-display-real-name-instead-of-login-name @hernani-cerqueira suggest it should be a module: "Everywhere the username is displayed, the property that is read is the decorated_name in the User model. You only need to override that, preferably with a module, and no need to touch on templates." I suppose the other points could also be addressed in the same way?
(31 Mar, 01:22)
netk
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