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Comment by stiray | Hacker News Reader

I am looking at advent of code for years but never tried.

Why? As they would like to force you to login with GitHub, Google, Twitter or Reddit account.

I will wait for the next year, maybe 2024 Advent of Code will be less intrusive.

If not... I can live without it.

A hint to the authors for simple load/save, far simpler than what you have now, without use of intrusive 3rd party providers: use Digest::SHA qw(hmac_sha256_hex); $digest=hmac_sha256_hex("levelX:true,...", $key);

(And no, I wont workaround them. This is why we got into such situation - as we were still using intrusive services instead boycotting them, it is matter of principle not of technical workaround)

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What is your problem with that? They don't request any unreasonable personal information/permissions, if I recall correctly they only use minimal info only: the unique user identifier (email address), and name.

They don't need to work with transactional emails, password resets, etc. Lots of failure modes and corner cases to support, for a minority. Lot of work and inconveniences saved for a free project that surely takes some effort to organize every year.

Not saying I agree with the login requirement, but ... why not just create a throwaway account just for this purpose? This seems like a silly reason to miss out on something you might enjoy.

I logged in with my Reddit account in a previous edition. This year I deleted my Reddit account in protest. Therefore, goodbye AoC history.

It put a stark ~~contrast~~ focus on why I don't use those signups options: because the two times I've used it it came back to bite me (the other one being when Google blocked my account for months).

Yeah - this is what happened to me too.

I deleted my Reddit account because I don't want to support Reddit any longer, so I lose access to anything I used "Sign in with Reddit" for - it's subtle lock in that tends to only hit issues months later.

It's why I never use social media logins for anything that gives me the choice not to.

> Why? As they would like to force you to login with GitHub, Google, Twitter or Reddit account.

So take 30 seconds to create a throwaway Reddit account with a throwaway 10 minute email account and use that?

I guarantee you’ll be spending 100X more time on the problems than you would in creating a throwaway login if that’s your concern.

Using 3rd party login providers is just a simple way to run a website without having to build, run, and maintain your own user accounts and login system. You can see that the permissions they ask from GitHub are minimal.

It’s been like this for its duration. I would wager heavily against this changing for 2024.

I agree that using an auth provider is unnecessary for the problem faced. A bit ironic considering how AoC is all about programming challenges. Funny seeing the problem solved in 4 lines of Perl.

If there were a trustworthy auth provider it wouldn't be as bad, but I don't really know of any... maybe something in the Fediverse?

Do you have a link?

I've been looking for some nice Perl solutions, I imagine it's pretty much the optimal language for many of these problems.

Maybe re-read Stiray's post?

I would hardly call it intrusive. The premise of the game involves tracking stats over days and years, so they need a login system. Using external trusted identity providers is a lot safer for their users than if they tried to implement their own login system.

Anyway, don’t hold your breath.

Parent calls the auth providers (google, github, etc.) as the intrussive ones, not the AoC itself

Just make a throwaway google?

Google won't let you do that. If you want a google account, you'll provide proof of your identity or link the account to an existing account.

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