71–80 of 141 posts
Lots of short, google-able answers to trivial questions will get you much more points than thoughtful answers to hard questions.
SO can be useful for preliminary screening, but only if you look at the actual answers.
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>But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience. To be fair, it's not SO's fault. That was an absurd statement. Why don't you rather tell us what confuses you about the login process?
I'll give you the example of the OnStartups answers community. I am logged in on Safari, and when I go to my user page, it says my OpenID is from Yahoo. Fine. Now I open Firefox. I try to login to OnStartups, because it doesn't know who I am. I click on Yahoo, go through the authentication process. Guess what: it says it can't find that account on OnStartups (wrong answer), but finds it on StackOverflow, and asks me…
I do think the no-login approach is exactly right, but their implementation seems a little buggy.
"they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX" SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it. And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?
The same people who say SO has "a poor UX" are the same people who say that Reddit has "a poor UX". They're conflating gradients, rounded rectangles and text shadows with a user's experience of the site.
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What happens if you clear your cookies?
Does it really matter? Accounts are just a minor convenience for most users of StackOverflow, they're not the gateways to your content like Facebook.
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There is a way to recover your account if your cookie is lost. http://stackoverflow.com/users/account-recovery (this is linked from /users/login) It does require that you provided a valid e-mail address at some point, which we don't require.
If this mechanism(link to a valid e-mail) is used to recover an account, is this considered a form of registration?
If you do provide one, it lets you recover your cookie based account is all.
The "account" is as throw away as you want it to be, basically.
"they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX" SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it. And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?
The same people who say SO has "a poor UX" are the same people who say that Reddit has "a poor UX". They're conflating gradients, rounded rectangles and text shadows with a user's experience of the site.
http://stackoverflow.com/ is easy to browse without having to login. http://quora.com/ puts up a wall.
Furthermore, when you create an account with Quora, it begs and pleads with you to give it all your personal information in your Facebook account. Not just "What is your token ID?" or even "Who are your friends?", no! Everything about you! But what takes the cake is the history tracking that Quora uses. It suggests topics that interest me. Like both Barnes and Noble and Borders... from an article I read on HN yesterd…
let people log in with Twitter and Facebook, to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms. StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect. I anonymously answered one question, and all of a sudden I have a profile. No confirmation e-mail, no Facebook or Twitter crap. Just use the site and bam! you're registered. It remembers me every time I come back a…
Just be careful with your account in that state. Stackoverflow only knows your account by a cookie right now. You can't log into it from another machine or if you happen to clear your cookies you won't be able to log back in. So it is in your best interest to "solidify" your membership if you care about your account.
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I'm curious why you're impressed by minified HTML. Usually, given the CPU cost to minify a page and the fact that savings are in the tens of bytes after gzip, it is nearly certainly an overall performance and user experience loss.
I think it makes the browser's job faster and easier. Minifying for me has improved the speed of my sites.
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StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect Maybe it works for you, but I'm still utterly confused about how to login. But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience. To be fair, it's not SO's fault.
UX rule #1249042: If anything on a site is ever confusing, it's always the site's fault, not the user's. So don't feel bad.