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With the approaching deprecation of OpenID, I'd like to create an email-based login so that I'm not "part of the problem" anymore. I currently use the openid.stackexchange.com OpenID provider just for SE. I visited the add new provider page and I see three options. I refuse to use Facebook or Google to log in, so I tried using the same email address that identifies my OpenID account as the email for the new email-based login. However, it gives me the message that the "email is in use by a different account".

There's this footnote at the bottom of the deprecation notice:

Remember, SE OpenID accounts are really email/pw accounts handled through complicated OpenID code path. They will be migrated to a simpler email/pw only code path as a part of this change. No extra work required on your part.

Which implies I won't have to do anything, but that directly contradicts statements further up in the announcement that indicate that I would have to manually add a new means of logging into my account. So which is it?

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tl;dr: You don't need to do anything.

When someone adds an email/password credential right now, it does create a Stack Exchange OpenID account for them behind the scenes. It then can be used as an OpenID credential either with us or elsewhere, but if you log in later on one of our sites and type in that email and password, it will be processed differently than a third-party OpenID credential would be. Think of it as the OpenID part being abstracted away so the vast majority of users never know or think about it. This allows us to stop accepting OpenID credentials in general before we deprecate our own service as well.

Later on, we have (at the moment vague) plans to convert existing Stack Exchange OpenID accounts to simpler email/password credentials and shut down the OpenID service itself, but that won't affect your ability to log in.

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  • What about for people who use SE OpenID as credentials for other websites?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 22:59
  • @Ano We have data for that. Last I heard, it's a pretty small number of people, but either way I'm sure we'll have some sort of heads-up notification for them before the changes... if they happen. There are no firm/well-defined plans on the StackId shutdown front at the moment, even though that's a direction I think we ultimately want to go in.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Mar 11, 2018 at 3:21

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