I’ve gotten a bunch of reports recently about people trying to use Avalanche with OpenID. I’ve told them to use the generated username and password, but some people are still having trouble, because their username contains a ”/” character.

When sending requests to the BC API, Avalanche uses the http://un:pw@url.com format, so if the username (or the password) has a ”/” in it, that will mess up the request. Encoding the username (so openid.aol.com/screenname becomes openid.aol.com%2Fscreenname) sends the request to the right place, but then the login information is incorrect.

Since this generated login is used only in Basecamp, would it be possible to generate usernames and passwords that use only letters and numbers? I realize that making this change and notifying all OpenID users about their new third-party logins is a pretty big deal, but I’m sure that mine is not the only integration that breaks because of this.

The other alternative is for Basecamp to decode usernames and passwords when they come in, in effect accepting the “openid.aol.com%2Fscreenname” username and mapping it to the “openid.aol.com/screenname” username internally.

Either of these would be really helpful for me.

Thanks,
dbroekman

Also on a similar note, having a username with an @ sign in it does not work.

Is there any way around this?

Is the only solution really to tell my users to change their username and password to not have special characters?

I’ll look into the decoding suggestion and report back. Thanks for noting this.

David, you should check into Oauth. This is the specific use case that Oauth is being developed for—and is designed to work with OpenID. I’d love to see Oauth make its way into Rails.

We used avalanche and we liked it a lot.
We then moved to the usernames being email addresses: e.g. bob@company.com
We can no longer login through Avalanche (web site works fine).
I submitted a bug on the avalanche site, but have not heard back.

David, is there any progress on the decoding idea? For now, the updated version of my widget gives an error message when trying to log in with an @ or : sign in the username or password.

By the way, Mike, in the latest version of Avalanche, it will warn you if your username contains an sign in it and tells you that you can use Avalanche if you change your username to be without the sign.

way late on this topic, but I’ve noticed that using me.yahoo.com%2fmyidentifier does in fact work for avalanche now.