Forum ‹ General ‹ How to authenticate users, now that Yahoo Games is closing?

[LazyLand]

Now that Yahoo Games will be no more, I am wondering how to authenticate the users of my games, so that I get the same user_id that I used to get inside Yahoo Games.

Since we're being told that Yahoo Games is closing and that we should migrate our users elsewhere, we have to be provided a way to recognize our users!

[Guillaume]

I don't have any Yahoo Games, but how were your users managed ? With a Yahoo authentification ? Do you have any way to get your users email ?

[LazyLand]

I let my users log in with Canvas, described here: https://gamesnet.yahoo.net/documentation/yahoo/canvas

No, I do not have any way to get their email addresses.

[Henrik]

The backend services do not have a way to tie users from different authentication providers into a single user. They are always going to be different users as far as our systems are concerned, i.e. their ConnectUserId will always be different.

So for you to migrate your users, you will have to make them authenticate twice, and then copy whatever BigDB and Payvault data you have over from their Yahoo connection to the second connection. For example, if you decide to migrate them over to Facebook, add a Facebook Connect button in your game that they can hit after they authenticated as a Yahoo user, so that your game now has two connections and knows two ConnectUserIds for the user. Then you can store a marker in the PlayerObject of the second user that lets your game knows that it should copy everything over from the first user, and after that redirect the user over to Facebook, and when your game loads there and your user has the marker in the PlayerObject, you can migrate it.

It's always more secure to do this in serverside code if you can.

Of course, every game is different, this is just general advice.