Design issues with ask/share/report/praise/reply and login requirement.

Howdy folks,

We are getting killed by our customers on the post and reply box and the login requirement, and what I'd consider to be a design issue that's causing our customers data loss.

We have two groups of customers, one for a public site, where we don't have the concept of an account for the site (we aren't even collecting an email address anymore, except for certain functions) - and a set of internal customers that do have accounts. Those internal customers have an OpenID enabled account - and we encourage them to use their "eXtension" provided OpenID for third-parties, including Get Satisfaction.

Both sets of customers - but particularly the internal set with the OpenID's are getting frustrated when they go to post a new topic (or reply to an existing one) - enter all of the information, and then use the OpenID login, only to lose everything they entered because of the OpenID round-trip/redirect requirements.

It's even happened to me when I go to reply, forget I'm not logged in, and have to go copy/paste my response before I dare click the OpenID login.

I didn't think this was happening to the folks just "signing up" with an email/password - but we had this problem report today:

http://getsatisfaction.com/extension/...

and from what I can tell that should have been an "email/password account" person - unless they used a third-party OpenID or Windows Live or something similar and shouldn't have had data loss, but they sure reported one. And when we are getting feelings like SUPER FRUSTRATED - that are probably as much or more about this data loss issue as they are the actual problem report.

We have some design issues ourselves, we've integrated links to GS and the widgets in a way that it's not clear that the person is leaving a extension.org-managed property and off to a third-party - we have this dual-customer issue - and others.

But this data loss on post/reply due to login is really getting us - and we are likely going to dump Get Satisfaction after our current Basic Year is up because of it (and perhaps because of our own failure to integrate GS well), we went to Get Satisfaction because you guys offer an experience/tool set we couldn't easily develop ourselves, and none of the off-the-shelf packages have.

But maybe you can do something/anything to help :-)

1) Save the posted information with session or keyed cookie and let it survive the OpenID login.

2) Don't show reply or post *at all* until they login

2a) Or give me a "company" setting to where I could set #2 for my company.

3) I know you are pimping your "integrated login" for premium users - but heck, that's why we do OpenID in the first place. Per company controls for OpenID or just dealing with the data loss issue would be good - we'll still take the heat for the usability of OpenID.

Help us out a little or point me in a direction to where I can minimize this, on our current plan, for my customers.