ClosedID

A few months back I discovered stackoverflow.com and with it a new way of logging in, OpenID. Like most people who've been online a long time, I have signed up to countless sites, creating a huge list of usernames and passwords and it keeps on growing. OpenID is an attempt to counter this trend by letting users create a single ID with a central provider and use that log on to access many different sites. So when starting work on my own website and in need of a logging in mechanism this was the thing that sprang to mind.

A little time on the aforementioned stackoverflow pointed me in the direction of a well regarded framework to easily add OpenID support to my site which i promptly downloaded. It includes a variety of samples for using it in different types of project including the ASP.Net MVC framework which is the core of my new site. After a brief scan of the code I ran the project to see it all in action. That's when things started to go wrong.

Whilst trying to log in with my OpenID (provided by myOpenID.com) I got an error indicating problems with the myOpenID.com server. Obviously with this being launched from example code running from the personal web server that is part of Visual Studio on my home network my first step was to go to a major OpenID site on the internet to eliminate all those issues. So back to stackoverflow I went, and I had problems logging on there too. I did find that by switching to use google as a provider I was able to access both stackoverflow and the example code website on my dev machine. It was not a good sign though, problems with the ID provider and all of a sudden people can't log in to my web site because of someone else's server. Still sometimes things go wrong so I decided to leave it for the night.

The following day at work I was able to log into my stackoverflow account perfectly so assumed that there had just been a temporary problem which had been fixed. However, returning to my home development that evening I still couldn't access stackoverflow or use the example code to log on. Investigating the problem further I found a directory of OpenID sites and flicking through a bunch of them I was able to log into some but others gave me the same errors. This is happening with multiple computers running both Mac OSX and Windows.

Is it a problem with the specific OpenID framework I am using, combined with something about my home internet connection that is different to my work connection? Maybe, but I don't know if all of the failing sites on the web are using this same framework or if a variety of methods of using OpenIDs are all displaying this problem. I believe I have a version of the same library as used by stackoverflow, but the others are a mystery to me. I'm considering trying out a different framework to see if that has better results, but currently the whole thing has left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth so I may just go back to the age old pattern of offering my users yet another username and password to remember, safe in the knowledge that any problems logging on to my site will be my own problems and nothing to do with a server completely outside of my authority and influence.