[JDEV] In-band registration

[Ryan Eatmon]

Ok guys...  step back a second and think about the situation.

Jabber does not have in band registration to compete with ICQ.  You 
honestly think we looked at that sort of stuff when we created the 
feature set of Jabber?  It is there because we have a distributed server 
architecture.  There is no central location you can go to register a 
Jabber account because we don't control any other server except for 
jabber.org.

Part of the goal was to make it easy to run a jabber server.  Just 
configure it (which can be hard enough), and run it.  That's it.  That's 
all that is required.

If instead we decided to ax in band registration, and require a web page 
or some other script or what not for registration, then you just made 
administrating and setting a server that much more complicated.  You are 
now requiring a web server.  To run a Jabber server you must be running 
a web server?  I do not support that at all.

As for Clients becoming simpler by not supporting it, while it may 
appear that way on the surface, it's not really that hard to support 
registration.  Especially with x:data support.  If a server is created 
that sends out an x:data form, and can parse the results.  Then a 
client, which should be supporting x:data anyway, would have no problems 
rendering a form for the user to fill out and passing the results back 
to the server.

All that said.  You can disable registration on your Jabber server and 
do whatever you want to.  Setup a web site, manually add users with a 
script, LDAP, etc...  If what you are suggesting is that we as an 
organization help create some template web pages/CGI, or some scripts, 
or what not, then I am in full support.

But I am not in support of getting rid of in band registration.



Bart van Bragt wrote:
> Justin Karneges wrote:
> 
>> Realistically, it is not horrible, and I'm guessing Jabber only has it 
>> to compete with ICQ (the only legacy system that also has in-band 
>> registration, AFAIK), but it does put extra effort on the client and 
>> server developers.  If we axe in-band registration, we can shift the 
>> effort to the administrators, who can develop pretty websites that 
>> guide the user along.  This would also simplify client development, as 
>> there would be less of a need for new user wizards, explanation of 
>> what a JID is, etc, as the pretty website would take care of it.
> 
> +1 !
> 
> Users really need a bit more guidance, preferably in their mother 
> tongue. IMO a website on the public servers would be great and it is 
> also in concordance with the 'simple client, complex server'-paradigm.
> 

-- 
Ryan Eatmon
reatmon at jabber.org