Identity Spec

[edrex]

Currently I'm using Mozilla Persona for identity. This gives only one piece of information: the user's email.

I can additionally hash the email to get a gravitar icon.

Problems:

• Can't associate pages with email. That would leak emails.
• I could associate with a hash of email
  • but then can't retrieve email for post (eg for notifications)
  • also no human-recognizable author name

Wishlist:

• Display human recognizable public name
• Retain email (but not in post or public profile, would have to be user DB)

Twitter gives this, but doesn't give email. Twitter handle would be a nice option for associating posts with a public ID (email isn't public ID)

Another option would be to allow the user to set a local username, but then changing it would break the assoc.

Other possibilities:

• Additional DB (or type) for user profiles
• ID is hash of email?
• how to include inline?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1541239/unique-constraints-in-couchdb

[edrex]

Here's what I'm thinking:

• user id is md5 of email
• show gravatar on post (no lookup needed, hash is embedded in page)
• link to profile page (later can show posts etc)

If at some point we decide authors need names, we will add a user record type, editable by that user.