Add API to get user by GitHub ID about w3c-api

[deniak]

An idea is to allow a user to add his username/id from other websites. We have this kind of mecanism when you edit your phones on your user profile. This way, we could have:

facebook:[email protected]
github:jdoe
bitbucket:johndoe123
...

[darobin]

That's perfectly fine, but the important thing (from my use case POV) is less to capture the information than to find the reverse: given a GH ID (or possibly other), what's the W3C user?

[deniak]

I have a few concerns about this. One of the reason we are not relying on the W3C username is to make it harder to crawl our data. Since the GH ID is public, it will be easier to find the user profiles.
Also, maintaining urls specific to GH can be a problem. What if people give up on GH for another system?

Another idea is to add the url to your W3C profile on your GH profile. Unfortunately, there's room for only one URL.

[darobin]

Easier, yes, but what information can you get from our API that you can't get from GitHub? Some, perhaps, but nothing radical. It doesn't allow you to crawl our data all that much — the GH data is already crawlable.

If people move on to another system we introduce a new endpoint and retire this one. It's not like we're building the Parthenon or something.

If you put the URL to your W3C profile in your GH profile, you are making this exactly as crawlable as you objected to in your first sentence... We'll also get partial and wrong data, and prevent people who want the linkage from having a link to themselves (which matters for those of us who use GitHub as a showcase).

It's okay if you don't want to do that, but I'd like to know because if not I'll need to build such a mapping into my tooling anyway :)

[dontcallmedom]

as we are making progress in capturing the linked identity between github and w3c accounts, this feature request is becoming important again.

For the repo manager, it would be ideal if we didn't have to manage affiliations there, but instead be able to fetch it automatically from the W3C database, which right now we can only do after having manually established to whom a github account belongs.

(paging @jean-gui since he has been working on the github integration)

[jean-gui]

@dontcallmedom How do you see this implemented. Should the URL (/users/github/jean-gui for example) redirect to the corresponding user, or should it display user profile directly?

[dontcallmedom]

I have no strong preference, but I suspect having an intermediary resource might become useful, e.g. to show additional metadata about the connection between the w3c & github account (when the connection was made, if it was oauth validated, etc).

I think maybe starting with /users/github/jean-gui giving a simple HAL link to the w3c API endpoint for the user would leave us enough room for improvement.

[jean-gui]

I'm not sure it's very useful to provide that intermediate view. All the information about the connection between the w3c and github accounts is already in the user: https://api.w3.org/users/ll90noiui680c8k848sgkcow4ow44ss

[dontcallmedom]

ok, then I guess a redirect is probably best (although I would feel better about if if #59 got fixed)

[sandhawke]

What's the content at the end of that user link, @jean-gui ?

(I only see Missing API Key, and I don't want to get my heart broken again by digging deeper myself.)

[jean-gui]

It's just my user with verified information about my Github account.

[jean-gui]

@dontcallmedom Done! See http://api.w3.org/users/connected/github/1479073. Unfortunately you have to use Github IDs rather than logins because this is the only information that we know to be exposed and unique for any OAuth connection (we may want to add more services later).