Twitter Sign In Changes Username

awilcox_

New here, so I hope this is in the right place. When users register in the usual way using their mail and then log in using Twitter after having registered, the Twitter connect plugin will replace their previously chosen username with their Twitter handle instead. How do I get this to stop happening? Is it a problem in Vanilla or a problem with the way I set up the Twitter API?

Thanks,

Alan

awilcox_

Hmmm, I also notice that when ever users sign in using any of the social buttons, their email gets changed to whichever email they used to register with that social app. For example, I registered with Vanilla using my work email. I registered with Facebook using a personal email. When I sign in to Vanilla using the Facebook icon, the email address in my profile changes to the email that I used to set up my Facebook account. If I go into my Vanilla profile and change my email back to my work email, save it, then log out and log back in through the Facebook icon, my email gets changed again to my personal email. What is causing the username and the email to change, and how can I stop it from happening?

hgtonight

Welcome to the community!

IIRC, the facebook, twitter, openid, and google sign in plugins use the email address to link the stored authentication to a vanilla user account. This makes it necessary to change the email to match that which was used by the connecting service.

If you don't want to share your email to users, you can uncheck 'Allow other members to see your email?' when editing your profile.

awilcox_

Thanks for the response. I want to share my email with other members, I just want to share the correct email. Also I would think that all users would want to share the email address that they used to sign up with Vanilla, not a different one. I understand that the plug-ins need to use that email to authenticate, I just don't understand why it would force a change in Vanilla of both the email and the username. It is usually impossible (unless you have a very unique username) to use the same username for everything you sign up for. If my username for Vanilla is RedRover, and by signing in through Twitter it changes my username to CactusFlower, it will be very confusing to Vanilla users. If this is the way it works, I do not see an advantage to having the sign in via the other services. Because I have not been on Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin for very long, I have not had an opportunity to use these to sign in to other communities that I am a member of via this route, but I cannot imagine that if email and username changes were forced like this that anyone would ever use that route. So I guess what you are telling me is that we should disable this method of sign on for our Vanilla community?

hgtonight

The reason most sites implement Social Connect buttons is to reduce the friction associated with creating yet another account on another website. The idea is that most people have a vested interest in the identity associated with their FB, Twitter, or Google account. The connection buttons give them access to a new forum with their existing identity. This should result in more signups per view.

If you have an established community and are looking to just add some quicklinks to share on twitter, I would look into something like the VShare plugin.

awilcox_

No, our Vanilla community is just starting up. We are expecting a mix of members, some of whom will want their community identification to be linked with their work identity and others will be fine with it being linked to their social identity. I'm pretty new to this whole thing so I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the idea of mixing the social with the work. Is it usual for people to choose to log in using the shortcut they want to associate their Vanilla account with or are most people lazy like me and just click on the first choice?

Accent

Sorry for resurrecting this; has the situation changed? It seems very weird that once I used the twitter login function, both my username and email changed to match my twitter info (even though I'd registered without it)... and now I can't even use my old login credentials anymore and am stuck with the twitter login. Can't the plugin function by storing the user's twitter email address secretly as well as the one they chose to use for the forums? (The twitter description is retrieved and afaik it isn't displayed anywhere...)