We don’t get crazy big numbers here at the site, but we are very, very healthy. The vast majority of visitors (around 98%) are not registered users. They are just folks listening to music and generally lurking about.

With the advent of OpenID (read about it at wikipedia, home page), users don’t have to “create an account” to log in to sites, they just have to “log in” and away you go. CC is even an OpenID provider (for a small donation).

I think the right thing to do is enable OpenID as a way to enable access to features currently reserved for folks with a “real” account here.

I’m a little nervous about giving uploading rights to OpenID accounts, but I think that’s for me to let go and just let it fly. I think.

The fact is, anybody today can register a bogus account at yahoo! or hotmail and sign up here at ccMixter to create havoc (many have done just that). I wish I could say OpenID adds a layer of accountability but, in reality, I don’t think it does.

It took me less than 3 minutes at http://claimid.com to create an openid account that gives me anonymity across the web.

What it does do (I hope) is allow for any of 150 million OpenID users ability to quickly recommend and review music here at ccM. It also allows them to jump in and (hopefully) be helpful in forum discussions.

My ultimate hope is that we can chip away at the 98% of folks who are just lurking, many of whom obviously love the music here, and give them a way to participate.

Thoughts and feedback would be helpful…

VS

Being totally pessimistic, I dread the idea of moderating uploads and comments by OpenID users. But I guess it may be a good idea to reach a happy medium somewhere between totally anonymous and what we have now.

How about to start, OpenID log-in can be used for recommends and creating playlists?

A “real” account is required for comments, uploads, etc..

*just off the top of my head. Haven’t thought too deeply about this yet. : )

If this is worthwhile depends very much on the self-image and going forward objective of ccMixter.

At the very least, there’s the basic question if ccM should be trying to grow into a large inclusive community or if it would be better off to remain a smaller group.

I’d be totally happy with either model (each is interesting in its own way), but sudden growth might have implications:

With larger numbers of content creators (sounds and/or words) come associated issues like increased moderation demands as teru mentioned. And some of those have different implications, like for example moderating comments vs. moderating uploads. All of these are solvable, but probably end up having technical as well as people/time implications. (e.g. additional moderators, a distinction between different levels of admin access etc.)

If the addition of OpenID ends up leading to an avalanche of new users and resulting moderation needs, it might require a relatively speedy addition of moderators and thus possibly the addition of a more granular security system with roles?

just so we’re all on the same page, here are some caveats:

- There are currently 3 roles in ccH, anon, user and admin, plus ‘editor’ which is a total hack. Other than that, ccHost (the underlying code of ccM) does not have a very flexible model for ‘roles’ of users. This is a non-trivial undertaking (a couple of weeks of dev, a couple weeks of bug shakeout). In the past, the rationale has been to keep things simple for ccH admins. Managing roles can be a big time suck.

- Unlike other areas of developing the site, I don’t know much about implementing OpenID here, I’ve poked around a little and think I get the basics, but that’s never enough in the real world.

So the way it works is that I would first have to tackle the issue of ‘roles’ in ccH in general, and then layer the OpenID thing over it in order to segregate OpenID users. Not unthinkable, and, as spin points out, is likely a necessary step if our user base kept a sustained spike when managing roles is trivial compared to managing the moderation of uploads and topics.

Here’s another thing to think about: I don’t have the exact count but a huge amount of registrations fail (maybe as high as 1 in 10 or 20, I don’t know for sure) because their mail accounts bounce the confirmation mail. Now, some percentage of those are people trying to hack in, but I suspect many are legit musicians who have mailboxes that don’t like the CC server. Having “same as native” OpenID accounts as an option alleviates all of those issues.

I prefer not to have this thread spin off into a discussion about extending our current model for user roles in ccH — unless of course, the consensus is that enabling OpenID accounts simply doesn’t make sense without it.

VS

i’ll just add a bit of 2 cents in non-technical terms….

i think teru brought up a good point regarding moderation, but i’d say the biggest time drain would be having to moderate uploads which might use unlicensed source, or more specifically commercial source which shouldn’t be used. it’s hard enough to track that kind of thing down, and we seem to rely on others to point stuff like that out where it’s applicable (as a flag for instance). with registered users, admins can contact a guilty party and discuss an issue with source or samples. With an OpenID submission, I’m guessing the only option would be to delete the track.

we can’t have too many recommends or comments on tracks, so i’d be all for opening that functionality to OpenID visitors.

the other thing i’d be slightly concerned about is if you don’t need to register to utilize the functionality, will that seriously reduce the number of registrations? this could also be both a good or bad thing, depending on the view (as spin pointed out).

so in conclusion, i’d be all for offering some degree of OpenID functionality (recommends, comments) and limiting others (uploads) to registered users.