[Kevin Michaluk]

Hey All,

You've been requesting unified login across Mobile Nations properties for literally years, and I'm happy to say it's *almost* here. In just a couple weeks we'll be rolling out phase 1 of what we call Mobile Nations Passport.

Passport gives members the ability to seamlessly use their existing account login on other Mobile Nations sites. So if you're a member of iMore and want to jump onto Android Central to post on the forum or enter a contest, you easily do so without having to register a new account. The first time you login to Android Central, your account will automatically be setup on the fly as you login. We don't want to force you to become a member of all of the sites - but the moment you want to become active on another site you easily can just by logging in. We have a lot of great features planned for Passport that we'll be rolling out in rapid succession. But first things first.

Unifying Accounts for Existing Usernames Across Sites

For the past year we've been "reserving" unique usernames across sites. So if you registered in the past year with a unique username and it wasn't already in use on any of our other sites, we automatically reserved it there for you so only you could register it (by creating a new account with the same user name and email address as your existing account). Or, if you had a username on one site for even longer and it wasn't in use on another site, we've also prevented others from registering it.

The big pain point we have to work through is dealing with existing user name across sites that don't appear unique. In other words, you may have your username on Android Central, and another person has the same username on iMore. Or, you may have the same usernames on two or more sites, but each time you've registered you used a different email address (which gives the appearance to us possibly being different people).

We've worked the math out and from 5 million accounts are down to a small fraction (literally a thousand accounts) where it appears different people across sites share the same username. In this case, we're going to allow one user to keep the existing name while the other will be allowed to change it. We have some fancy algorithms worked out here to make it fair to all.

IF YOU HAVE ACCOUNTS ON OTHER MOBILE NATIONS SITES, READ THIS:

If you have accounts on other Mobile Nations sites that have the same username, please login to them and make sure you have the same email address on each account. This will allow us to recognize that you are the same owner of the username on multiple sites, and make your account migration easy.

If you are registered on more than one Mobile Nations website, but have different usernames, please email and let us know the sites you're a member of, your usernames and the existing email addresses tied to each account. From there we can help change your username so you have same identity across all sites prior to the rollout of Passport so that all accounts unify smoothly. Taking early action on this, before the automated process runs, will help guarantee you get to keep the username you like best.

We'll keep you guys and gals posted as we get closer to rolling out Mobile Nations Passport.

Thanks!

Kevin

[Alli]

So, IOW, you're going back to the way it used to be when it was SME and "one registration ruled them all?" and our post count followed us around?

[kch50428]

Great... the Android fanbois and fangrrls can troll that much easier...