How Accounts Work in the Next-Gen TidBITS Infrastructure
Despite the fact that Tonya and I had the flu all last week, we’re still planning to flip the switch on our Internet infrastructure move late this week. That’s a plan, not a promise, but if all continues to go well, our new system should send everyone who subscribes to TidBITS a welcome email message. It will include a link to the live site and instructions for changing your TidBITS account password.
Since it will be relevant for many of you immediately, I’d like to explain how we’re using accounts in our next-generation infrastructure, hosted at ArcusTech and DigitalOcean. As before, you must have an account to subscribe to the email edition of TidBITS — that’s how we know your email address. A standard account in our WordPress-based content management system includes your name, email address, password, and subscription choices. There’s also a link to change the profile image that will be associated with any comments you leave. Passwords are hashed and salted — the system uses bcrypt — making the data tasty, but designed to choke any cracking software.
For those fine and upstanding citizens who support our work, the account information also includes TidBITS membership details and controls, along with a personalized full-text RSS feed. (Memberships are managed by the Paid Memberships Pro plug-in for WordPress, and all payments happen through Stripe.) So you’ll have to log in to find that RSS link and to access the many Mac software discounts we’ve negotiated for you. Logged-in TidBITS members also won’t see paid ads.
We’ve brought over your TidBITS membership information, such as membership level, expiration date, and renewal type, but because this is an entirely new system, no previously automatic renewals can take place. The new system will send you an email when it’s time to renew; you can also check that date on your account page.
We’re using a system called Discourse for commenting, and although it too requires an account, it boasts a single-sign-on capability that enables it to rely on our WordPress account system for authentication. Once you’re logged in on the main TidBITS site, you won’t have to log in again to leave a comment in Discourse. There are lots of user preferences you can set in Discourse, so that will be worth exploring.
For email, we’ve given the nod to the transactional email service SendGrid. Subscribing or unsubscribing from one of the weekly TidBITS lists (English, Dutch, or Japanese) or individual articles as they’re published (for TidBITS members) involves clicking a checkbox in your profile page. That action automatically makes the appropriate thing happen in SendGrid’s lists, so they remain in sync with WordPress. So again, the TidBITS account is the central source of data.
There are two exceptions to that with SendGrid. First, if your address bounces, SendGrid automatically adds it to an unsubscribe list locally, but does not communicate that fact back to our system. Similarly, anyone who clicks the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email message will unsubscribe directly in SendGrid, with no communication back to WordPress. Such a link would be possible but seemed like it was more work than it was worth. The upshot of these exceptions is that if you want to resubscribe after a bounce or a link-triggered unsubscribe, you’ll need to contact us at [email protected] for help.
I hope that gives you enough of a conceptual overview to get started as soon as you can access the new site. I’ll write more in the future to explain other aspects of what’s changing.
Hmmm, my TidBITS log-in uses a different email address than the one where I actually receive TidBITS emails. How will that affect my account?
Second, I already have a WordPress log-in; will I have a problem with the new site wanting to use it to log-in rather than my TidBITS log-in?
The new system doesn't support multiple email addresses anymore because that was a feature necessary only for Take Control, where people had ordered books from multiple addresses. So what will probably happen is that one of your addresses will be used for the username and the other for the email address.
Usernames can't be changed (but are largely irrelevant, since you should login using your email address) and you can change the email address.
There's no connection between a WordPress.com login and our site.
Adam et al,
I renewed my supporter relationship with Tidbits last week. The charge showed up in my bank account by the end of last week but the "Apple" does not show up at all. Is this a glitch or is there a delay of some length that is known at your end but not publicized.
Last year I moved into Maryland from elsewhere. I updated my address for Tidbits and selected Maryland from the pull-down menu. My new address showed up in the ttransaction summary and was correct except for the "State" which incorrectly shows "MA" instead of "MD". Perhaps your system grabs the first two letters of State name? If so, supporters from MAine, MAssachusetts and MAryland will share the same State abbreviation. A week later I still could not log into my account to explore, but will try again once my "Apple" shows up when I surf to Tidbits main site. Good luck with the Infrastructure conversion.
The new commenting system has no way of identifying TidBITS members, unfortunately. And since we've now canceled all memberships in the old system, the mistaken state doesn't matter at all.
No wonder this modernization effort has taken years to implement. I remember you talking about it wistfully way back when. The complexity makes my head spin. Good luck keeping all the moving parts synchronized. ;-)
On another Discourse site I'm a member of, some users have little badges on the bottom right of their avatars (to denote a special status). Maybe this would be a way to highlight members in the new system? Though maybe too much manual effort to keep the badges in sync with your supporter database? To have a look at what I'm talking about, you can go to: http://community.monzo.com
Do you know how they do that? If it's programmatic, then I'd love to look into it.
I spoke to one of their developers, and it is programmatic. In Discourse, these things are called 'flairs', and the staff ones are assigned based on the email address, whilst others are set based on roles. Apparently Discourse has a fairly good system for setting this up with very little effort (have never done this myself, just passing on the info). A quick search turned up this thread on the Discourse community which talks about the feature, but I'm not sure where the full documentation is.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/avatar-flair-not-badges-for-groups/48576
If there's any other specific information you want me to try and get, let me know either here or drop me an email.
Thanks, I've added it to our feature list to look into.