Move third-party login to top

[lectrician1]

Description

I think that the third-party login methods should be moved above the standard login fields because users are more-likely to have such accounts and therefore login and proceed to edit OSM with them. This is also important because on mobile they are even less-noticeable in their current position.

Screenshots

[dieterdreist]

I don’t know whether people are more likely to have these accounts, but we should not make it appear as if these were the preferred login options. For our users it is best to use a dedicated OpenStreetMap login so that their login habits are not shared with a third party

[lectrician1]

Today, I had a friend create an OSM account and I literally pointed out to them that they could create one with Google and they didn't see the logo until I physically pointed it out to them out the existence of it on the login page. It's clearly not in a visible place.

We should run an A/B test seeing if putting the login logos above yields a greater number of account creations than at the bottom.

[tomhughes]

We do not have any ability to run A/B tests currently, so adding that would be a major undertaking before we could run any specific test.

I tend to agree with @dieterdreist though - there are other things that are important beyond getting the maximum number of signups and we're not a startup that needs to juice fake numbers for the next investment round.

[pnorman]

Since we're looking at the login form, we could look at existing accounts.

[tomhughes]

Look at them for what?

[lectrician1]

To see what proportion of active accounts have linked third party accounts.

[tomhughes]

How do we determine what is an "active" account exactly? If you just mean accounts that are currently open then:

  provider   |  count  | percentage 
-------------+---------+------------
 wikipedia   |    2900 |          0
 windowslive |    7148 |          0
 github      |   16379 |          0
 openid      |  189114 |          2
 facebook    |  443209 |          4
 google      |  756662 |          8
             | 8009956 |         84

What I don't understand is what conclusion we are supposed to draw from that - are we supposed to infer that having a linked account is better than not having one in some way?

[lectrician1]

Exactly. This isn't really a useful statistic.

[pnorman]

We can conclude most people don't have linked accounts, so we shouldn't put them on the top of the log in form.

[lectrician1]

Given that third party logins haven't always been around and there are only ~5500 active accounts which is 0.5% of the overall number of accounts, you can't make that statement. We're trying to find the impact moving it to the top will have, not whether people have used it in the past or not.

[lectrician1]

I don’t know whether people are more likely to have these accounts, but we should not make it appear as if these were the preferred login options. For our users it is best to use a dedicated OpenStreetMap login so that their login habits are not shared with a third party

If OSM is concerned about the privacy of its users, then we should not offer third party logins in the first place. I fully support Wikipedia not having third party logins, and now that I think about it, I would for OSM as well.

[simonpoole]

Given that third party logins haven't always been around and there are only ~5500 active accounts which is 0.5% of the overall number of accounts, you can't make that statement.

Just for the record: you are reading that statistic wrong. OSM has ~5'500 unique active contributors per day, ~45'000 per month and ~300'000 annually.