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Comment by yebyen | Hacker News Reader

I learned today that StackOverflow (and company) have responsive support persons who respond via e-mail, that will help you recover and merge your cookie-based StackExchange accounts if you've lost access and there is sufficient evidence that they belong to you. (I thought I had registered the account under the myid.net provider (who is now defunct?) but no.)

That has to cost a lot of money. With the dozens of ways you can authenticate with StackExchange, I don't know why I was surprised to learn I had previously created an account without actually creating an account, but it was so.

Also, anyone who reads Korean can tell me if this says "sorry we're closed"?

http://kingdon.myid.net

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What is infuriating about the stackoverflow sites is that they treat each site separately so you end up with multiple logins across the "network" that you really don't care about. Then they do that annoying thing where they display the page, then detect you are "logged in", and then tell you to refresh.

That site is very good at Q&A, but UX wise it's terrible. It's as if they've only ever tested it with their own devs, and never done any real hallway or external usability testing.

I've tried to participate in their "meta" site, but the pedantic and condescending tone there is even worse than it is on the main sites.

Furthermore, Atwood seems to take the success of the platform as a ringing endorsement of all its characteristics, as evidenced by the recent commentary on user experience and the development of his forum.

Bob Martin's recent "And I'm very sorry that when you finally brute-force your way to some modicum of success that you will credit your bad behavior, and recommend it to others" has sprung unbidden into my mind once again ...

I think this is mostly to do with cookies not working cross domains (for obvious reasons).

This seems likely. Still, with a bit of planning they could have gotten around this. Everything dealing with identity could have been served from a single domain. There probably would still have been issues, but they would have been resolvable.

But Google manages to do this, I'm unconvinced.

it reads: thanks for using myid.net so far, we have decided to discontinue the service.

date of close : 2013-02-27

somehow I knew this question would get answered here, thanks very much!

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