Good evening. I'm Hiram Q. Gasman, and I'm here to tell you about the wonders of OpenID.

OpenID is a bit like SceneID (you know, the login you use to sign into Pouet), in that it's a system for sharing one user account across multiple sites - except that it's decentralised, so anyone can set themselves up as a provider of OpenID accounts, without it having to go through a central authority - and anyone can set up a site to allow people to log in with their OpenID account. It's designed so that you only have to share your password with your chosen OpenID provider, so you don't have to trust every random site you log into to not steal your password.

And now you - the demoscener - can join in the mass ID-sharing orgy! sceneid.net is a brand new service which provides OpenIDs based on SceneID authentication - in other words, if you own a SceneID account you now have an OpenID waiting for you. Your OpenID is a URL of the form:
[your-sceneid-username].sceneid.net
- for example, mine is gasman.sceneid.net . (I don't know what'll happen if you have any spaces or other weird characters in your username, or whether SceneID even allows you to have a username like that...)

To use it, you can either log in with your SceneID at http://sceneid.net/, or just go straight to an OpenID-enabled site (WikiTravel will do if you don't have any better ideas), enter your OpenID URL, and follow all the prompts.

(Note: When using OpenID, the one and only site you need to trust not to do anything evil with your password is the OpenID provider - which, in the case of sceneid.net, is me. If you have a problem with this, don't use it. But then I do have admin access to Pouet, which means that if you're reading this, you're probably already trusting me not to steal your password.)

"Big fucking deal!" I hear you cry. "So now I can use my SceneID password to log in to a bunch of irrelevant websites that I've never used!" Ah, but just wait until demoscene sites start supporting OpenID. (Demozoo will be doing this fairly soon...) This would be a very good thing, for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, it's generally going to be an easy thing for website owners to do. OpenID is becoming a bit of an industry standard, so there's a whole load of example code and libraries to handle it - for some out-of-the-box website packages like Drupal and MediaWiki, you just need to drop a module into place, whereas with SceneID, you'd have to do a lot more fiddling around with custom PHP code. And because it's decentralised, you don't need to arrange anything with scene.org either. And that means that we could have a lot more sites using it - think SceneWiki, IN4K... Partymeister?

Secondly, it means that if scene.org goes down again (heaven forbid), the web presence of the demoscene doesn't *completely* grind to a halt... sites hosted on scene.org itself (such as Pouet) would disappear of course, and anything requiring SceneID logins would fall over (including sceneid.net), but sites with OpenID support would still work - people could sign up with alternative OpenID providers and log in with those accounts instead.

So have fun with your OpenIDs everyone, and if you're a website owner who thinks this would be a neat thing to support if it wasn't so damn confusing, get in touch and I'll do my best to answer any questions. (Oh, and if anyone from scene.org has any objection to me brazenly rushing ahead and registering sceneid.net without asking them, feel free to get in touch to discuss that sort of thing too. I did try contacting the appropriate channels, but couldn't get a response - the SceneID mailing list seems to be a bit dead, or at least refusing to talk to me...)