What does it mean to subscribe to an OpenID account?

[davidlevine]

OpenID accounts like davidlevine.livejournal.com offer Dreamwidth users the option to subscribe (by hovering over the OpenID icon or going to the account's profile page). However, subscribing doesn't seem to have any effect.

Similarly, an OpenID account can grant access to a Dreamwidth account. But since an OpenID account can't have a journal, I don't think this has any effect either.

Is this a not-yet-implemented feature? I can imagine that it would be very useful if a Dreamwidth user could subscribe to a LiveJournal user's OpenID account to include the RSS feed of that LJ user in their reading list, but this doesn't seem to be how it's working currently.

(By the way, how do I code a reference to an OpenID account so it's clickable and gets the OpenID icon? <user name="davidlevine.livejournal.com"> doesn't work.)

Comments

[sorchasilver]

I think they allow people to subscribe to Open ID accounts because you can get notifications for things like icon uploads. And the OpenID can grant access so that the user can see contact info etc if set to access only.

To reference an OpenID account I think you need to know the "ext_####" allocated to that account.

ETA: Just checked, and the ext_#### is the one you need, but needs to be entered as ext-####, so {user name="ext-3270"} (replace {} with <>) gets you sorchasilver.livejournal.com.