Coming changes re: login

[Denis]

I read the announcements. Great that we won't be reset

But there is also talk of a method of login that will make it possible to delete the app and not lose your farm. The question is: will we be able to switch to the login method without loosing our farm?

[Denis]

I made the question stand out because there was no answer given

[worfc]

Yes, of course. The purpose of "Facebook login"* is to associate some more-or-less-permanent identifier with your farm, so it can be recovered when the app gets separated from your login-ID.

Currently, if you delete the app, next-install sees that there is no user-ID and creates a new [random-ish] one for you. You can see how that would be a problem if you had all this great farm work built up!

The idea of this new feature (FB-login*) is that it would associate your other (FB) account and, after delete/reinstall, you could say "hey, my farm is the one associated with this account", and get it back.

Right now, that's not even a manual process. About the closest we have is: if you delete & reinstall, and use a nickname, and convince me that it's really you and not Noivad trying to hack your farm, I could copy your old farm into your new user-ID by hand. Maybe. Assuming I didn't screw it up. Even if I managed without screwing it up, you can see how this does not scale to dozens -- let alone 100s or 1000s or millions -- of users!

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* Temporary name. It might be Facebook, it might be something else. It might be both. I'll probably start with Facebook unless their SDK is just too much of a PITA.