If you're reading this article, you're probably here because you've just read that we're switching to a standardized ID system for logging into the SABR website and other sites. I hope to use this article to explain why we're doing it, and why it's good.

It's a fairly long explanation, because it's a fairly involved issue, but if you're really curious, this should explain the situation.

History

When the SABR website was first brought online about six years ago, SABR's internet plan was to have all online resources be built as a part of one large package. This was the way it had to be done, for an organization with needs as unique as SABR's. This also allowed all of the programs to work together, which otherwise would have been impossible.

The usernames on the website were unimportant - no one else ever saw them, so they could be an email address, part of your name, or anything else you felt like. The website was a way to find information, and not a way to collaborate, and certainly not visible to the public.

Now, just a few years later, the internet software world (the software that runs on servers and powers websites) is very different. There is a great variety of software publicly available, open and without licensing fees, to do many tasks. More importantly, the community has developed ways for this software to work together that are standard. Most programs are able to speak these shared languages, so SABR can use multiple pieces of software working together. This allows us to use software that is maintained by the community, rather than software written just for us that is very expensive to maintain and update.

So SABR has decided to move more in the direction of this open source software. As a result, in the next few months you will see a number of connected SABR websites go online for members that are not powered by the same software as SABR's main website.

The technical challenge

The hard part of this is to make sure that all members can log in and use all of the resources. This is solved by a software package called CAS, which stands for Central Authentication Service. If you want to log in to the convention website, it sends you to the login server, which then tells the convention website that you're a SABR member, and tells it your name and email address.

The convention website, as well as the future encyclopedia and other sites, just need to know how to talk to that server, which is not that hard. The software that runs these sites have certain standards for usernames (for example, the encyclopedia doesn't accept the @ sign found in email addresses), which creates one technical challenge.

But the technical challenge is not the greatest reason for this change - the reason is that usernames have a different meaning now.

Why usernames matter

In the past, logging into the SABR web site was just for viewing member resources, joining committees, or maybe posting classifieds. In the next few months, we will all be able to edit the SABR Encyclopedia, and next year, all of those edits will be visible to the world. So now it matters what your username, because it will be out there on the internet.

So, for example, you might not want your username to be your email address, if you don't want just anyone to have it. You might later decide that you don't like your email and want to change it. But that's where it gets a bit harder.

The SABR Encyclopedia is using the same software, and many of the same principles, as Wikipedia, but with a few key differences. Wikipedia's founding principle is that anyone can edit any article. This allows them to have a huge base of editors, and makes it very unlikely that anything will stay wrong in an article about a popular subject for very long.

That last part is important, though - it is articles about popular subjects that are most effectively patrolled, and most accurate, on Wikipedia. That's fine, since that means the most important articles are the most up to date.

Why SABR is different

For SABR, however, we consider every article important, and wouldn't want a serious error to go unnoticed in an obscure player's page for a long time, which it could certainly do under the Wikipedia system. Most professional baseball players who have ever played are not "notable" by Wikipedia's standards, much less popular. So we have opted for a system in which every editor must be logged in and identified as who they are.

Making this choice leads to wanting to see changes to articles attributed to actual people, with actual names, which leads to the system we're using for SABR IDs.

This is a long explanation, but it's the reason that the system is the way it is - the SABR ID represents who you are, and will never change, so it could be used to attribute all of your online research to you, going forward.