I have been focused on OpenID implementations lately, specifically in WordPress and Drupal. The Drupal effort is for my own sites.
Until this weekend, I had turned off new user registration at my Drupal sites, because I get too many junk user registrations. However, to incorporate OpenID into a Drupal site, you have to allow users to register themselves, regardless of whether they use OpenID or not.
I think this all or nothing approach actually limits the incorporation of OpenID within a Drupal site. If you limit registration to administrator’s only, then people can’t use their OpenIDs unless the administrator gets involved. If you allow people to self-register, there’s nothing to stop the spammy registrations.
I believe that OpenID should be an added, optional field attached to the comment form, allowing one to attach one’s OpenID directly to a comment, which then creates a limited user account within the site specifically for the purposes of commenting. Rather than just providing options to allow a user to register themselves, or not, add another set of options specific to OpenID, and allow us to filter new registrations based on the use of OpenID.
Currently, the new user registration options in Drupal 6x are:
- Only site administrators can create new user accounts.
- Visitors can create accounts and no administrator approval is required.
- Visitors can create accounts but administrator approval is required.
Turn on the latter two options and you’ll get spammy registrations within a day. Not many, but annoying. I believe there should be a fourth and fifth option:
- Visitors can create accounts using OpenID, only, and no administrator approval is required.
- Visitors can create accounts using OpenID, only, but administrator approval is required.
With these new options, I could then open up new user registration for OpenID, but without having to allow generic new user registration for the account spammers that seem to be so prevalent with Drupal.
To attempt to implement this customized functionality at my sites, I’ve been playing with Drupal hooks, but the change is a little more extensive than just incorporating a hook handler and a few lines of code, at least for someone who is relatively new to Drupal module development like I am.
Taking the simplest route that I could implement as a stand-alone module, what I’m trying now is to modify the new user registration forms so that only the OpenID registration links display. You’ll see this, currently, in the sidebar if you access the site and you’re not logged in. Unfortunately, you have to click on the OpenID link to open the OpenID field, because I’m still trying to figure out how to remove the OpenID JavaScript that hides the field (there is a function to easily add a JavaScript library, but not one to remove an added library).
With my module-based modifications, rather than a person having to click a link to create a new account, and specify a username and password, they would provide their OpenID, and I would automatically assign them a username via autoregistration. To try my new sidebar module, I decided to turn my Drupal sites into OpenID providers, as well as clients, and use one of them as a test case. Provider functionality is not built in, but there is an OpenID provider module, which I downloaded and activated with my test Drupal installation (MissouriGreen).
I tried my new module and OpenID autoregistration but ran into a problem: the Drupal client does not like either the username or email provided via the Drupal OpenID provider. Why? Because the OpenID identifier used in the registration consists of the URL of the Provider, which is the URL of the Drupal site I used for my test, and the Drupal client does not like my using a URL. In addition, the provider also didn’t provide an email address.
Digging into the client side code, I discovered that the Drupal OpenID client supports an OpenID extension, Simple Registration. Simple Registration provides for an exchange of the 9 most requested information between the OpenID client and provider: nickname, email, full name, dob (date of birth), gender, postcode, country, language, and timezone. With Simple Registration, you can specify which of the items is optional and which mandatory, and the current OpenID client wants nickname and email.
By using Simple Registration on the provider, I could then provide the two things that my Drupal OpenID client wanted: nickname and email. Unfortunately, though, the current version of the OpenID provider doesn’t support Simple Registration. I was a little surprised by this, as I had made an assumption that the Drupal OpenID provider would work with the Drupal OpenID client. However, OpenID is in a state of flux, so such gaps are to be expected.
Further search among the Drupal Modules turned up another module, the Drupal Simple Registration module, which allows one to set the mandatory and optional fields passed as part of the OpenID authentication exchange. The only problem is that the OpenID Provider also doesn’t have any incorporated hooks, which would allow the Simple Registration module to provide the Simple Registration data as part of the response. To add these hooks, the Simple Registration module developer also supplied a patch that can be run against the OpenID Provider code to add the hook.
I applied the patch and opened the module code and confirmed that it had been modified to incorporate the hook. I then tried using the Drupal site as OpenID provider again, but the registration process still failed. Further tests showed that the Simple Registration data still was not being sent.
All I really want to do is test the autoregistration process, so I abandoned the Drupal OpenID provider, and decided to try out some other providers. However, I had no success with either my Yahoo account or my Google GMail account, even though I believed both provided this functionality. The Yahoo account either didn’t send the Simple Registration fields or failed to do so in a manner that the Drupal OpenID client could understand. The Gmail account just failed, completely, with no error message specifying why it failed.
I felt like Barbie: OpenID is hard!
I finally decided to use phpMyID, which is a dirt simple, single user OpenID application that we can host, ourselves. I had this installed at one time, pulled it, and have now re-installed at my base burningbird.net root directory. I added the autodiscovery tags to my main web page, and uncommented the lines in the MyID.config.php file for the nickname, full name, and email Simple Registration fields. I then tried “http://burningbird.net” for OpenID autoregistration at RealTech. Eureka! Success.
The new user registration is still currently blocked at creation, but the site now supports autoregistration via OpenID. Unfortunately, though, the registration spammers can still access the full account creation page, so I can still get spammy registrations. However, I believe that this page can be blocked in my mandatory OpenID module, with a little additional work; at least until I can see about possibly creating a module that actually does add the OpenID only options I mentioned above. The people who generate spammy user account registrations could use OpenID themselves, but the process is much more complex, and a lot more controlled at the provider endpoint, so I think this will help me filter out all but the most determined spammy registrations.
Once all of this is working, I’ll see about adding the OpenID login field to the comment form, rather than in the sidebar. If one wonders, though, why there isn’t more use of OpenID, one doesn’t have to search far to find the answers. Luckily for Drupal users, OpenID seems to be an important focus of this week’s DrupalCon in Washington DC, including a specialized Code Sprint.
