use forum login in other parts of site?

[jprjay]

Discussion in the news area etc seems to require facebook, google etc, and there seems to be no way of using the forum login.

Cross-site authentication like those are a potential privacy threat and I (I'm sure others as well) do not use them. Why should someone have it easy to identify your postings across many (often unrelated) sites? A bit of Google searching can enable a potential employer, nosy neighbor or even stalker to learn a great deal about you (people's identities have become unmasked by people linking up unrelated posts).

Having a separate identity on each site where one is a member helps protect privacy.

 

[Xyro]

Discussion in the news area etc seems to require facebook, google etc, and there seems to be no way of using the forum login.

You do need a seperate account to comment on Phandroid.com. However, you don't need to make use of any of the cross site authentication options such as Google/Facebook/Twitter and so on. If you make a normal disqus account, you can avoid all of that. (Disqus is the commenting system we use, not some obscure social network you haven't heard of ).

If you sign up for a bog-standard Disqus account, you'll still need to provide an email address, but it is not actually tied to your google account. I.e it's no different to using your gmail account to register on the forum. (Although it is worth mentioning that your disqus account can be used on any other site that uses the same commenting software - you may or may not want to use the same account elsewhere).

We did actually suggest to the admins that a shared login for both sites was a good idea. So whilst I do agree it's a good idea, unfortunately I don't think it's going to happen.

 

[Phases]

We have talked about it before.. I'll see if we have any plans to make that happen.