SourceForge is the global technology community's hub for information exchange and open source software distribution and services. The network of media and e-commerce web sites serves more than 33 million unique visitors each month from around the world.

 

Luke, why did SourceForge decide to add OpenID registration and login support?

 

SourceForge primarily serves software developers, and we actively support the open source software development model.  We appreciate that OpenID is decentralized and leverages the user-centric, open architecture platform approach. 

 

Beyond the technical underpinnings, we also appreciate that OpenID provides our users with faster and easier registration and login.  While the majority of users don't need to register on our website, those that do are our most valuable "power users" so we want to make sure they have a great experience. 

 

By adopting OpenID, we're showing the market that we're leveraging the latest and greatest Web2.0 technologies.  Through OpenID we save our members time and eliminate frustration associated with re-keying redundant registration information or recovering forgotten passwords

 

Luke Crouch, Web Software Engineer

 

Did your team know how you would measure success?

Our goals were maybe more intangible and qualitative than other organizations.  For us it was really about improving user experience and giving our members easier ways to register and login using identities that they already had from AOL, Yahoo, Google, and others.

 

 

What results did you achieve after deploying OpenID

 

We launched with OpenID in May, 2008 and OpenID login has grown to about 10% of our total logins.  Our members who do use OpenID really appreciate having it as an option.

 

Beyond faster login, were there other potential benefits you were anticipating?

 

We expected that OpenID deployment would be pretty straightforward without a lot of disruption, and that's exactly what we experienced.  There were a few complexities for us since we already had an existing registration system, and we need to also enable accounts to integrate with legacy systems with command prompt access.  But we figured all that out and the entire project took us less than 3 weeks start to finish.

 

Any surprises, maybe things you didn't expect?

 

Getting the user experience right was critical.  In the end we decided to put the OpenID login on the same page as our traditional username/password login.  This makes it very clear to users that they have a choice between our traditional legacy login and the new OpenID option, while also minimizing required clicks.

 

 

We also added icons for the major OpenID providers as a visual queue and to pre-format the OpenID URL.  This turned out to be very helpful to our members.  This still allows members to use any OpenID provider of their choosing, but makes it easier to login using the largest OpenID providers that cover a good portion of our membership.

 

What advice would you give a company implementing OpenID?

 

While most of the open source libraries are well written, there are some slight inconsistencies across platforms.  We had to do a bit of debugging to get everything working optimally on our site.  Since it was open source, we could also contribute those enhancements back to the community – which we think is a positive.

 

For organizations who may not have the time, talent, or inclination to deploy the open source libraries themselves, it might be worth exploring 3^rd party vendor offerings that provide turnkey solutions.