The key question is, "How do I delete the Yahoo openID without deleting the Yahoo ID or my email account?"

Went to post a comment on a site off blogspot. It wanted to authenticate me. Several choices, one of which is openID. A quick search says Yahoo supports openID. Punch the button, enable openID. Yahoo says, " To make things easy, we have generated this identifier for you: https://me.yahoo.com/a/fjTOjrsJTo_4YZ_blah_blah_LU- I'm thinking the identifier is some sort of behind the scenes secret handshake thing, so good enough, off we go.

I'm authenticated, post is submitted. Take a look at it in place and what I see is the random 28 character string identifier as my username. Blech! Not desired outcome. Go back to Yahoo openID page, and look at customization options. The page warns against using the identifier string and equals my Yahoo email username (snertly), so I cleverly pick something similar with an underscore: snert_lee. Page says name is available. I say make it so. Page chugs for a moments them belches up a generic "something went wrong, try again later" type error.

I try another posting. 28 character gibberish comes up as username. And now snertly and snert_lee have been fused together so they both point to the same mailbox and there seems to be no way to delete one or the other without killing both.

It's frustrating and leaves a bad taste in my mouth vis a vis openID.

The ideal solution would be to be able to delete the openID and have snerly and snert_lee revert back to two seperate yahoo ids.

Hi snert_lee,

Sorry to hear of your problems using Yahoo! OpenID. We currently don't allow the deletion of the OpenID Identifier. Since we support the OpenID 2.0 spec, we do attach a fragment to the identifier to alleviate the recycling scenario. However, there could be a minor user education issue due to the fact that when users delete an identifier and recreate the same identifier it is treated as a new identifier at the RP even though the identifiers look the same to the user.

When you have multiple identifiers set up, you have the ability to select which identifier you want to use for your intended action. Are you stating that even though you multiple identifiers you were not given the option of using your custom identifier instead of the machine generated identifier?

Regards,
Sabari Devadoss
Yahoo! Membership