Readers who look at our blog itself (rather than one of the lovely sites that reprint our articles) may have noticed that you can now comment in either the usual WordPress way (Name/Email/Link) or by logging in with a social media profile from one of a large range of providers, including WordPress, Livejournal, Yahoo, Google and many more.
This uses the broadly-cooperative openID system. If you run a website that accepts reader contributions, you should allow comments with openid because it helps people to use their existing social media membership without you having to surrender any control to facebook, twitter, or anyone else (unless you choose to). You also don’t have to ask your readers to weaken their security settings like with disqus (which requires javascript and third-party cookies).
The comment form on our site is powered by the openid plugin, together with our co-op’s version of the comments-with-openid plugin which can be downloaded from our site. Please download them if you’d find them useful for your WordPress site. (I’d love to adopt the official comments-with-openid at wordpress.org because the previous maintainer doesn’t answer – anyone know how to do that? I’m surprised it’s not in the FAQ.)
Do you use some other platform? What tools have let you add openid logins to it? For example, Drupal has some openID support in its core distribution: what else is out there?
16 Responses to Comments with OpenID