demo use without login

[Digit]

(Sorry if wrong place for this feature request.)

On littlesis.org there's no apparent way to utilise the oligrapher and explore the potential maps of connection without signing up and logging in.

For something like littlesis, I cant be the only one who's tinfoil hat gets itchy at that.

I had hoped it would serve like the old theyrule.net would, except more open to wiki-esq crowd sourced data, and not requiring proprietary malware... but at least with theyrule.net you could explore it without having to hand over your identification papers at the gate. Could be an anonymous ip passing by, getting familiarised on the fly with the very pertinent useful data. Like checking a weather site, or a currency market site, you get to see and peruse and specify what of it you want to see and how, and no login is necessary.

Sorry if wrong place for this feature request, and is entirely a re-configuration decision of littlesis.org, n not anything intrinsic to the oligrapher software.

The button reads: Get started on a new map
and under it, the next line reads: or sign up for a LittleSis account

"or". Which is easily interpreted as suggesting one does not need to sign up, but then if you click the button, it takes you to a login page, with a line stating that you do need to log in to use it.

It seems non-login access would fit little sister's promoted remit much better, and login-only access would fit the remit of big brother better.

Please is it possible to have non-login access?

[aepyornis]

Hey @Digit

Thanks for the request. This is a fine place for it for now, although the issue is better suited on the main repo for LittleSis: I'm going to make an issue there to track it.

You are correct, while it's possible to view maps without being logged in you cannot create one without an account to LittleSis. This isn't a limitation of Oligrapher exactly, since there's nothing about Oligrapher itself that requires an account. Unfortunately, LittleSis does not have an notion of a 'guest' account and our current setup for editing oligrapher is closely tied to user accounts, therefore it would be a non-trivial amount of work will be involved in order to get it working as currently setup But I think it's a good idea to figure out!

Why need an account at all for Oligrapher? The reason accounts are involved is to save and load existing maps. There is no UI interface to load an existing map (which is just a blob of json, really). Your LittleSis.org account is used to store the oligrapher data. A nice feature to add to oligrapher would be the ability to load (and save) a map from a file. That way one could use oligrapher easily without having to log in and it'd be easier to use oligrapher outside of the LittleSis context.

[aepyornis]

see this issue: public-accountability/littlesis-rails#479