Saturday, August 15, 2015

login - Dealing with Connected Social Accounts and Potential Orphans


Our application has the following signup paths:


Twitter Connect Facebook Connect Email/Password


Once you signup with one, you have the option to connect either both social account (in the case of an Email signup) or the other social account (in the case of a Twitter or Facebook signup). By connecting each account you also have the ability to sign-in with that account going forward.


The question is, what's the best way to deal with potential orphaned accounts. For example:





  1. User A signs up with Twitter account 'mytwitter'




  2. User A signs out




  3. User B signs up with Facebook





  4. User B connects Twitter account 'mytwitter' to their Facebook login.




At this point User A's account would be orphaned.


I see a few options:




  1. Always require an Email/Password no matter how you signup. This isn't ideal since it creates friction.





  2. Merge User A with User B, which seems messy and has to have some privacy concerns.




  3. Send a message to User B that that Twitter account already exists. That doesn't seem ideal either.




Anyone have experience with solving this? Seems like it would be a common problem.




No comments:

Post a Comment

technique - How credible is wikipedia?

I understand that this question relates more to wikipedia than it does writing but... If I was going to use wikipedia for a source for a res...