Stack Exchange will end the OpenID support on July 25
Recently, OpenID lost one of the most important advocates, Stack Exchange, which operates a Q&A-type website such as StackOverflow. Stack Exchange will completely stop support for OpenID from July 25, 2018. At present, significant sites are gradually eliminating the use of OpenID in their products. This trend has been going on for a long time.
Image: By Stack Exchange [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Joe Friend is currently working as a product manager at Stack Exchange, and he explains why this decision made. The primary reason is cost, and the actual number of users is too small compared to the cost of maintaining OpenID-related features. According to the last statistics, in the past 12 months, only about 13,000 users have logged into Stack Exchange through OpenID. During this period, the total number of registered users exceeded 9.5 million, and the former ratio was only about 0.1%. Joe also mentioned that even if you count inactive accounts, users who choose OpenID only account for about 2.9%.
Although the major websites still insist on providing unified login function, this unified login function has basically been dominated by two giants, Google and Facebook. This status quo has completely violated the original intention of OpenID – the unified login system should not be in the hands of individuals. In theory, everyone can create a provider of OpenID, so many people choose to develop on their own, instead of using existing public services.
But over the past few years, more and more OpenID providers have stopped serving, largely because users feel inconvenient. Joe mentioned two providers that have been removed on Stack Exchange: ClaimID and myOpenID.
The above-mentioned situations should be highly valued by websites that rely on Google or Facebook. What if they decide to close these unified login services? Although it is unlikely that these services will be completely stopped, they may choose to turn off unified login for certain websites for the following reasons:
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There are certain legal or financial disputes between Google or Facebook and these websites.
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Complaints due to certain inappropriate or illegal acts on the site, regardless of the actual situation
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Regulatory adjustments in the use and sharing of data
Although the incident does not cause large-scale panic, companies that rely on unified login providers need to pay attention to incorporating these incidents into the overall disaster recovery plan. If a company’s login service fails, it can cause the entire company’s business to fall into a few weeks until they develop an alternate login service and notify their users.
