

Ask HN: Hosted forum with SSO? - MicahWedemeyer

I've got a community site that I built in Rails, and there's a forum kind of tacked on. It's really crappy and I hate supporting it, but some of the users really like it.  Plus, it's not really core to what we do.<p>I'd like to just sign up for some kind of hosted solution that I redirect/CNAME a subdomain to.  The only sticking point is that I really want single-sign-on (SSO), so that my users don't have to register new accounts or anything.  Preferrably, I would just construct a link that has their user id, username, and userpic URL all hashed together into some parameter that I append to a special link.  Then, when they go to the forums from my site, they're logged in automatically.<p>(Note: tenderapp.com does this for a ticketing system, and I like it a lot)<p>Any YC companies that do this?  Anything else people can recommend?
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sweis
Have you considered using OpenID, Facebook Connect, or both? Then you can
support two-click account creation for anyone with a Yahoo, Google, MSN, or
Facebook account. Check out Zoho and Plaxo's sign-up process for an example.

Also, HN uses Clickpass, which is an OpenID identity provider.

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MicahWedemeyer
It's a good idea, but now that I've seen how well SSO can work with my site's
existing user accounts, I'm hooked.

~~~
sweis
Plaxo ran a trial using OpenID identifier-select and the OAuth Hybrid
extension. They had a 92% on-boarding rate for users, which blew away
expectations:
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/comcast_property_sees_9...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/comcast_property_sees_92_success_rate_openid.php)

I'd imagine that FB Connect sees similar numbers.

