Persona pulled out of Discourse core

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#1

It seems the Persona login module for Discourse was essentially abandoned. It breaks a lot, we even see that here sometimes. Because of this, they pulled it out of Discourse’s core. Somebody said they’re going to try to reimplement it as a plugin this week, but we shouldn’t hold our breath on that. There have been rumors that Mozilla is going to pull the plug on Persona, and I’m beginning to wonder if these are true.

What should we do about this, in the short-term? There are a few options:

  • Enable traditional user/pass authentication, and have people “reset” passwords to login.
  • Use other authentication methods - Google, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, and Twitter - to authenticate. The downside to this is that everybody has to have an account on one of these sites, and most of them wouldn’t be compatible with the current Persona authentication.
  • Find a Ruby developer who can help put it back in, and make it reliable.
  • Use a combination of the first two points before this. We’d have to send everybody emails about how to log in if we did this.

I would prefer the third option, but I don’t know if we can do it before lots of new Discourse updates are pushed out.

Thoughts?

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#2

In the short term we should continue to support Persona authentication.

Long term, option #1 is not an option. I really don’t want to be in a position to have to secure passwords and go through a code audit to support that level of security.

But this is an issue I’d table until we know the long term path for Discourse. If it becomes a viable communication tool for Mozilla then we should either resource proper Persona support of have the conversation for third-party authentication methods.

#3

So since they pulled it from the we won’t be able to upgrade correct? Or is there a way to upgrade and keep Persona in?

#4

The code will have to be moved into a plugin.

#5

Can we find somebody who knows Ruby and Persona to do this?

#6

Well we don’t need to have someone who knows exactly both of those pieces of software. A Ruby dev would do. Is there a way to search for volunteers in Mozilla contributors to find someone who would be interested in taking this on?

#7

Can we have the new plugin support Firefox Accounts instead|also?

#8

I’m not sure - is that possible?

#9

There’s only five on Mozillians. I’m sure there are more that just don’t have it listed. https://mozillians.org/en-US/search/?q=ruby

#10

Is there a procedure for asking for assistance?

#11

Firefox Accounts is not aimed to websites authentication AFAIK.

#12

Its going to be used for the Firefox Marketplace website.

#13

That’s not the same, Marketplace app will use Fx Accounts to handle your account there, it’s part of the Firefox OS experience, as well as other apps who want to store account information across devices.

But I don’t see discourse as an app that needs to do that.

#14

Just to reiterate what I said earlier:

  • Discourse still needs to prove itself as a communication platform for Mozilla
  • There is a growing list of “must have” features:
  • initiate thread via email
  • Persona
  • private categories/subcategories
  • better email subject lines / headers (for filtering)

I wouldn’t spend much time on this topic until we’ve reached a consensus in Discourse. At that point, it should be a properly resourced project in the same way that Mozillians.org is.

@gerv and I talked a bit about this over email. I’ll let him offer his comments here too.

#15

The Marketplace app is just a wrapper around the Marketplace website, so its a website fundamentally. It may not have been a use case anyone thought of, but if you can do it for one website, you can do it for another.

#16

Hey, so, good news. Someone named radq split out Persona into a plugin for Discourse. I pushed it to our dev instance, and it works perfectly. We’ll push the newest Discourse update, along with this plugin, to production soon. Crisis averted.

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#17

Why would you try to implement Firefox Accounts sync when you can use Persona?

Discourse doesn’t need to sync user data, just authenticate, and that is what Persona does.

#18

I am not sure if this is the right thread, but was one of the few search results for “Persona”…

The thing is: Persona Login does not work on all browsers, and is specially hostile against free browsers.

I’ve tried to participate using both uzbl and icecat but I had to fallback to chromium in order to be able to participate on the discussions here, : (

Anyone else having problems with the Persona login? Should I file a bug?

#19

Have you tried any other Persona websites? http://webmaker.org uses Persona, worth giving it a shot. If it also doesn’t work there, head over to Bugzilla and file a bug in the Persona section.