"Name contains invalid character" and other user-hostile GUIness.

Dewi Morgan - July 27, 2007 - 17:26
Project:OpenID
Version:5.x-1.x-dev
Component:OpenID Client
Category:bug report
Priority:normal
Assigned:Unassigned
Status:active
Description

Site: http://www.dewimorgan.com
Attempted OpenID URL: http://dewimorgan.livejournal.com

I have verified that this OpenID URL works on a third party site (http://usabletype.com/weblog/rslog/).

However, when using it on www.dewimorgan.com, I get the following strange behaviours:

Bug 0: There is no administrative interface for the module visible once turning the module on. There is no documentation for the module anywhere, so there's no way to tell if this is expected behaviour or not.

Bug 1: Clicking the "Log in with OpenID" link in the Navigation menu, the link disappears, but nothing else happens.

Bug 2: Entering the above OpenID URL into the Navigation menu and hitting enter, nothing happens.

Not a bug: Clicking the "Login/Register" link on the front page goes to http://www.dewimorgan.com/user/login?destination=node as intended.
On that page is a "Log in using OpenID" link, which changes the login form to a single input field.
Entering the OpenID URL into that field and hitting enter authenticates correctly with LiveJournal.
However...

Bug 3: after authenticating with livejournal, it comes back with two errors:
"E-mail address field is required.
The username contains an illegal character."

The account cannot be created with the URL as the username. But perhaps it means "Please choose a username and type in an email for validation" - in which case, the fact that either one is displayed as an error is definitely a bug, since the user is doing the correct thing, and the fact that the username field is filled with the OpenID URL is another bug. Displaying errors when the user is doing nothing wrong is deeply unfriendly and will drive people to the "report a problem" link, abandoning their account creation.

Bug 4: Filling those values out with a username "Dewi_LJ" and email address, it complained about a duplicate email address, since I am of course me. Any way to turn that off? I don't care if someone logs in with two different OpenID URLs and uses the same email address. Why should I?

Bug 5: Picking another email address, it said it would send me an email with further instructions.
But email it sent contained a login name and password. Which is exactly what OpenID is meant to prevent. Clicking the one-time login link, it took me to a form where it offered to let me set my password.

Bug 6: The "What is OpenID" link on the Nav bar has no 'target="_blank"' - which is not expected behaviour for explanatory links on forms.

Bug 7: Even after creating the account by going through the above strange dance, the OpenID stuff in the Navigation block still didn't work. I *could* log in from the login page using the OpenID URL, though, which suggests that contrary to everything the GUI was telling me, I was actually doing the right things.

#1

DanielTheViking - February 27, 2009 - 09:42

FYI: OpenID form field not showing:
http://drupal.org/node/378178

#2

scor - June 17, 2009 - 05:30

this is unlikely to be fixed in the contrib module, but see the related issue in core #216101: OpenID fails to auto-register account: Username invalid, email required about fixing the "Name contains invalid character" issue.

 
 

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