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Comment by siempreb | Hacker News Reader

> In order to remember which puzzles you have solved, we need to identify you in some way.

No, that's a lie. No need for identification in order to save progress, you can use: cookie, browser storage, etc.. for that.

Please be honest about why you are using social media for login. Because when I login with Facebook for example, you can see a large portion of my Facebook profile and depending on the plan you have way more than that.

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Not everyone has nefarious plans. Some people want to simplify the process for both parties. You have valid points, but there's no need to be so aggressive.

I'm not so certain, supporting saving data to a URL hash is pretty trivial to do, much easier than going with SSO integration - so I'm surprised the site doesn't support both at least.

URL hashing is annoying. It ends up transferring to someone else if you copy+share the link, and it disappears if you leave the site and come back later.

Better to just save to a cookie.

I like when this kind of sites allow you to copy-paste your sessions (as in a cookie clicker game), but (serious question) what they say is true if you want synchronized saves from multiple browsers/devices?

For saving your settings, Duck Duck Go gives you a random unique "passphrase" that is both identity and authentication, and also uses cookies so you don't have to input it every visit. It seems to work well.

Or they just Show a Progress-hash or something that i can store for myself if i wish to. To require a Login is annoying nowadays.

Anyway the Idea is good and it is really fun to solve.

> Please be honest about why you are using social media for login.

Without speaking for Regex Crossword (I'm in no way affiliated with them):

I suspect the reason may at least in part be security. Passwords are dangerous to keep around, hard to handle, computationally expensive if done right, and if an attacker gets at the database, people get angry. A social network provider (especially the options here, Facebook, Google, Twitter, GitHub and Windows Live) is much more likely to get security (against third party attackers) a lot more right.

That's just foolish - you don't need passwords of any kind. In fact you don't need accounts. You can just store cookies, accessible from this browser only, which tells you what have you solved.

That doesn't solve login in from a different device. And if you cleanup cookies for whatever reason, you lost the progress. So no, cookies don't solve the same problem as a user account (with login from a "trusted" provider) solves for saving the state of progress by a user on this game.

Maybe allow both options for people who want to keep their saves across multiple devices and one for users that use the same browser. It is a pretty trivial thing to do.

They already do.

That's a game, an exercise for several nights

Which disappears cross device or cross browser, making users flood your inbox with support emails asking where their progress went.

The website already uses cookies to store what you have solved. The cookie has 1 year expiry. Account creation is optional.

It already saves your answers in local storage, when you open the page in a new tab your progress is gone but your solutions are still there. You just have to click "Validate" for each of them. So the authors know it's a lie.

Using cookies is brittle because they can get purged. They also don't sync. You could display some base64 encoded data to copy and paste between sessions but that would be quite unpleasant.

One way would be to auto-generate accounts and display some random identifier to keep. Or maybe just offer e-mail to which they would send you a login link... There are other options but login with OAuth is not the worst.

So use the browser's local storage feature and realize it's just a little toy and not so important that it needs bulletproof data retention.

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