in reply to login with google account

I like the idea. Certainly the status quo here is ... bad.

But before we go too far down this road, I believe we should find out what changes Everything2 has made in this regard, if any. I like the idea of consistency with them — as long as what they have is worth copying.

Today's latest and greatest software contains tomorrow's zero day exploits.

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Re^2: login with google account
by Bod (Parson) on Oct 11, 2024 at 15:25 UTC
    I like the idea

    I too like the idea...

    But - I feel it should be about number 342 on the ToDo List that we don't seem to have.

    The questions that should be asked of any change are IMHO

    • Will it encourage young programmers to adopt Perl as their language of choice?
    • Will it improve the view of Perl to non-Perl programmers?
    • Will it encourage more people to use the Monastery?

    Google logins fail all three so it can only be classified as a "nice to have"

[reply]
      • Will it encourage more people to use the Monastery?

      Bingo. We have lost a lot of users, including very valuable, high-level Perl experts, because of our abysmal security posture. Fixing it is actually our #1 priority. I just haven't done it because it's extremely complicated and I don't know how to do it.

      Today's latest and greatest software contains tomorrow's zero day exploits.
[reply]

        I've implemented web systems with hash&salt/bcrypt password systems.

        I'm pretty sure i could find a way to do it in the PM codebase. But that would require giving me access to an "offline" dev copy with complete code and database access to do many test runs, prefereably a recent database dump with all the passwords reset to random strings. So this is rather unlikely to ever happen.

        In my opinion, a LOT of the dev backlog on PerlMonks stems from the fact that the ONLY system to develop new features is the live system...

        PerlMonks XP is useless? Not anymore: XPD - Do more with your PerlMonks XP
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[reply]
        Fixing it is actually our #1 priority. I just haven't done it because it's extremely complicated and I don't know how to do it.

        I don't know how to do it either...I'm almost certainly less close to knowing than you are...

        But happy to help where I can...what can I usefully do?

[reply]
      How do you know that Google logins fail on the third point? I can imagine a new way to login would encourage people to join - there'd be less impedance if they already have a Google login.

      And why do you think any Monastery change whatsoever would make a difference as far as the first two points go? Surely those are more down to Perl's own feature's vs other languages?

[reply]
        How do you know that Google logins fail on the third point?

        On the balance of probabilities, adding a new way for people to sign into a site that they can already sign into, isn't going to make more people sign in...it will only give existing users a different way to sign in.

        And why do you think any Monastery change whatsoever would make a difference as far as the first two points go? Surely those are more down to Perl's own feature's vs other languages?

        Not at all!

        The appeal of a language is not just the features of the language itself. There is the perception of "relevance", "employability" and what my generation would have called "coolness".

        More recent languages have slicker, more user-friendly forums and support sites.

        Perl Monks is a part of the Perl infrastructure whether we like it or not. I don't believe it portrays Perl as a relevant or cool language...

[reply]

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