Board Game Geek authentication

[JDGiardino]

I wonder if instead of passing in a username from a field, I could have users sign in with their board game geek account and get their user that way?

[nickdibari]

This sounds like a perfect use case for OAuth (Open Authorization) wherein a user authorizes your application to access their data from BoardGeek. If you've ever logged into a site through Google or Facebook, or allowed an application to access your data on another platform (think allowing DigitalOcean to access your Github account to deploy the BGG-Companion project) it's the same idea. A user in your application would be redirected to BoardGameGeek and BGG would ask them "Hey do you allow BGG-Companion to view your saved games/username/other information?" and if the user accepts your application can request data on behalf of that user from BoardGameGeek.

Unfortunately, based on some quick googling it looks like people have¹ requested² that BoardGameGeek support OAuth for this use case, but it doesn't seem to have gained any traction.

Footnotes

1. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1521917/bgg-api-and-oauth2 ↩

2. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2855128/provide-log-bgg-oauth-feature ↩

[halo123u]

I was thinking we can maybe do authentication on our end let the user save their username so that when they load the application.it automatically pulls data. Right now, it seems we submit a user name and then pull data from that.

[nickdibari]

Oh i gotcha, maybe you can save the username as a cookie in the User-Agent somehow? so when a user comes back the next day they don't need to enter their name again, the backend will know "oh there's a cookie already for this username in the User-Agent I can default the username field to the cookie value"

[halo123u]

I think that seems reasonable as a first step to get something going. This might need to be another issue, but I was envisioning something along the lines of storing this in a db. This would then be foundation for maybe adding other friends names and save them to your "user". I think it would be cool to be able to pick a random game from any user you save to your profile.

[nickdibari]

I'll leave it up to @JDGiardino and you for the implementation details :) but yes database (or some other file-based) persistence would be the most ideal! Especially if you want to add in some social-based functionality to the site you all would most probably need to store that data in longer-term storage.

[JDGiardino]

Hmmm yeah this will be something to put some research into. I wonder than options exists within DigitalOcean for hosting a database like that.

[JDGiardino]

Here's some useful documentation around cookies https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.1.x/quickstart/#cookies