another point

[charmian]

matgb brought up a really, really good point in the comments of the last post: what happens if I trust/friend an openID account, and that account is deleted and someone else renames their journal to it? Won't the owner of the renamed account have access to all of the content that the account formerly had access to?

Comments

[matgb]

Yes, if LJ reallow renamed accounts to use OpenID.

I guess this is one of those "I thought everyone knew" things as my non-geeky lawyer friend linked me to this awhileback:
PSA: LJ, purged accounts, and OpenID

And daweaver had already been talking about it (then, he's a major detractor for OpenID in principle anyway)

[charmian]

Yeah, but I mean, those two people are just two users. There haven't been any official announcements from LJ about it. Plus, people might not even know that they are granted access to any DW accounts (for example), so they can't warn their friends about their deleted account.

Also, from if LJ translate is correct, LJ has turned on openID for accounts renamed prior to 7/15/10: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fcommunity.livejournal.com%2Flj_ru_support%2F608701.html&sl=ru&tl=en

[sub_divided]

I wonder why it never occurred to someone before now that a system that makes it safe to assume a previously used identity on-site and a system that decentralizes your identity to other sites, would be in conflict. Just because there was no mass OpenID account creation, and no mass Rename sale, before?

I bet if LJ decided, going forward, to warn people who buy rename tickets that they won't be able to use OpenID because of concerns about misrepresentation offsite, most people would just shrug and be like, "Eh, I wasn't going to use that anyway".

[charmian]

I think this was because in the past, not as many of the deleted accounts were purged, making it not as easy or frequent to rename to a previously used account. It was possible before to rename, though. Now, LJ has purged a lot of deleted accounts, plans to purge the suspended accounts, plans to delete (and eventually purged) a lot of inactive accounts, freeing up a lot of namespace to rename in. It's uncertain exactly why LJ has taken these steps, but probably a large part of their motivation is that many people really, really want to rename and frequently state this vocally, even though it costs them $15.

Sure, I think that would be a fine way to go about it. OpenID is only important if you care about using that openID on other sites. (Though, this means that in the future, any imported comments will not be able to be accessed by them, and they won't be able to granted access on DW)