
In my article I want to discuss how to authenticate visitors to a small site without any effort on their part. Then I will call the person sitting on the other side of the HTTP connection a visitor. The client will call his browser. Perhaps, the described method is already widely used somewhere, and I will be grateful to the one who will tell me about it.
Suppose that we have a certain site and the task for the site is to distinguish the users of one from another. At the same time, we are aware of two facts: “the site visitor is lazy” and “the site visitor is shy”. This means that he is too lazy to fill in even the OpenID form, and it will not be registered even so. Having a little thought, we come to the conclusion that without registration (in one way or another) we cannot distinguish one visitor from another, but we can distinguish between two different clients (for example, leaving some long-lived cookies). Thus, each client becomes unique for us - without any effort on the part of the visitor. Not bad.
Two minuses are immediately noticeable: the same visitor must in some way “glue” two accounts in order to identify himself unequivocally on different clients; the visitor loses such a familiar concept as a login. If the first can be realized technically (I suppose that not all visitors will glue the accounts, but at least one out of five), then the second one may have difficulties more of a psychological nature: how will we visually distinguish one visitor from another? It is ugly to assign a ten-digit number, to produce a picture a la Habrahabr is also not convenient for permanent use.
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Probably, with this question everyone has to figure it out on their own, focusing on the specifics of their project. On my site, for example, I generate a random pair of Name Patronymic. Given that I have about 130 names in the database (80 of them will fit under the middle name), I get a good set of unique names for my visitors. In our society, it is considered normal to contact a stranger by name and patronymic, so there should be no problems. In the database, of course, I distinguish visitors by id.
Thus, we get the opportunity to identify the visitor independently. If for large projects this method is too inconvenient, then for small sites like blogs on WordPress, this option is quite suitable, because we get two obvious advantages: we remove Anonymus and allow visitors to use almost all the benefits of registered users. After all, everyone knows that the main thing is to hook the visitor with information, and he, thankful, will later register himself wherever he is asked. And first we get a masquerade of its own, if you want.