(I am sorry, I wanted to ask this question on “meta” first, but it says there that I “can’t post my question there because I don’t have an OpenID”)
Hello,
I am just a new user here and don’t understand much. I asked my first question on stackoverflow and received a quick answer. I wanted to thank the answerer, so I responded to his answer saying my thanks, but he said that I should “mark the answer as correct rather than posting a new answer”.
Not really knowing how to mark the answer as correct, I placed the cursor on the small up-pointing triangle above zero to the left of the answer main field. A small caption popped reading: “This answer is useful (click again to undo)”. When I placed the cursor on the small down-pointing triangle below the zero, I got this caption: “This answer is not useful (click again to undo)”. So, I figured that this was the tool for me to mark the answer as correct.
However, when I clicked on the upper triangle, an orange rectangular box popped up saying: “Please login or register to use voting”. Since I was still an unregistered user, I decided to click on “register” to get registered.
When I did, I was taken to a page saying: “Register with OpenID”. It’s so strange! That’s the first time ever I had to deal with such a new phenomenon to me as “Open ID” – before, whenever I had to register on any site, I just needed to come up with a new name (or a “nickname”) and a password. I was ready to do the same thing now, but, instead, I bumped into a completely new concept to me, an OpenID.
Anyway, in this “Register with OpenID” page, under the line saying “Click your OpenID account provider:” I chose the logo of one of my e-mail account providers (the site, on which I have my free e-mail box) and I clicked on that logo.
I don’t quite remember what I did next. Probably, a page opened asking me to click on “Agree” to sign into stackoverflow.com using my ID, and I must have clicked on “Agree”, but I am not sure – there is still a good chance that I didn’t. (I am sorry for being so irresponsible here – I really don’t remember).
Now, when I click on my name, on my user page it says that I am still an “unregistered user” and under this line the following can be seen:
- to the right of the word “Name”, my name is written;
- lower, to the right of the words “Member for”, “today” is written;
- lower, to the right of the word “Seen”, “20 minutes ago” is written;
- lower, to the word “OpenID”, a very strange string of letters, numbers and hyphens follows!
It’s really strange! I don’t remember choosing this string of letters, numbers and hyphens as my OpenID. How can I change it?
Plus, even if I did chose this string as my OpenID (which I really doubt about), why does this page still say that I am an “unregistered user”?
Thank you in advance for your answer.
You do not need to change your OpenID, it’s just a unique string that the system identifies you with. Nobody will see it.
When you try to log in to stackoverflow, it will send the string to your OpenID (email) provider. The provider will say “yes, I know who that is and I’ve asked them for their password”. Then stackoverflow will log you in, without ever asking for a separate password.