Social login help
Advantages of logging in with regular account or Social login
- Your email address will definitely be filled in correctly when you enter sales.
- You can subscribe to my (paid) Monitors & Notifications services to quickly notify you of sales on various sites.
- When logged in you can see a list of your previous entries and wins (under your user menu - My sale entries)
- You can opt in to receive free email updates when new public sales go live on the site (You can do this when logged in by going to the Edit user details page under your username in the top menu)
- If you've logged in via Facebook then you can use the free Facebook group parser, again found in your user menu under your username
Important note
If you create a regular account with a username/password on this site and then separately login via say Facebook, then you will end up with two separate accounts here. Things will work this way on most if not all sites featuring optional social login.
So how do you avoid that, and have the ability to log in to one account with either Facebook or your username and password?
Simply register a (free) account, confirm your account from the link in the email, and log in. Under your username on the top menu, click Edit user details. Then on that page, click on the Social accounts tab.
You can then link your social account with your SUS account by clicking the appropriate Connect with button and authorising us with the site you chose.
You can (entirely optionally) link one or more of your accounts at the available social sites (Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, GitHub) to your account here.
Once that's done then you can log in to the one account here either with your email/password, or via any of your linked social networks
What is this social login mularky and how does it work?
I'm not going to explain all the technicalities of what goes on under the covers, but what Is social login, how does it work, and what are the implications of using it?
Okay first of all, when you have a website like this where people can send information (e.g. sale entries) to the website, you have to decide, can people just send any old information or will people be required to create an account and sign in before they can send information to the site.
- For the purpose of sales, I want as many people to be able to enter as possible, as easily as possible, so login is not required. Users can enter any name/email to enter a sale, however if they enter an incorrect email, the seller may not be able to get in touch with them if they win the sale.
- Hence registration is also an option, users can register an account, then they can login with their email/password and on sale pages their information will be pre-filled in for them
- However a lot of people do not like creating accounts on websites, they already have too many accounts to keep track of. This is where Oauth and similar systems come in.
What is this social login mularky
- Facebook, Google, Microsoft and various other companies offer an authorisation API using Oauth and a couple of similar systems. What this does is allow a web site to utilise Facebooks (et-al) login security by logging in and authorising users via their site.
- So what exactly happens when I login via facebook (or whoever)?
- First of all, before I can use these sites for login to my site, I have to identify myself to them and define an Application (this website) - I then get given a unique identifier from each site.
- When you click the login with Facebook (or whoever... From now on I'm just going to say facebook) - I send you off to facebook with my unique identifier and a list of permissions I require (Permissions being, access to certain bits of profile information from your social site account)
- IF you are already logged into Facebook in the same browser, then you are simply presented with a page letting you know what permissions my site is requesting.
- If you are not logged in, you will see the Facebook login page. Once you login you will see the page mentioned in the line above.
- (At this point highly complex technical stuff happens in the background which I'm not going to explain!!)
- Assuming you accept the permissions I'm requesting, Facebook will redirect you back to my site with an encrypted token, which I can then use to request your Facebook name and email (and potentially other profile information, but that's all I need and use)
- It's worth pointing out I DO NOT get to see your facebook login details at any point.
- Once I have the token I request your basic profile information, extract your name and email, and use those to setup a pseudo account on my site, which is linked to your Facebook account.
- (A pseudo account is basically the same as a real account but without the password.
- In future when you login via facebook (Using the same Facebook account), your pseudo account is located and you are logged into that.
- It's also worth pointing out I do not, and have no plans to, post anything to any of your social accounts. In the unlikely event this ever changes in future, you will be warned in advance and you will be able to opt-out.
- Once you are logged into my site either with a regular account you setup, or via a social login, it is possible to link other social logins to your account - under your user menu - Your Account.
- If you link multiple social accounts to the one Signupsale account, then you will be able to login to your SUS account from any of the social sites.
- This gives you the convenience of two click login on various devices (much easier than typing in email/password on an iPhone for instance!
- Some of the social networks, such as Twitter, refuse to provide an email address from their social login system, if you use one of those networks to login then you will be presented with an extra page where you must enter a valid email address. You should only have to do this the first time you log in with one of those social sites...
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