Identity providers

The identity provider is the service that holds your members' credentials and signs them in. Your space chooses one, under Settings → General → Members → Identity provider, and that choice decides how people get accounts, what the console may change about them, and how someone recovers a lost password.

The four providers

Space Account exposes four switches for what members may change about themselves: their nickname, their basic information, their email address, and their password — the last of which also governs password recovery.

Google Workspace asks for a Client ID, a Client secret and the Workspace domain. OpenID Connect asks for a Client ID, a Client secret and the Issuer URL.

If the plan later loses the single sign-on or dedicated database quota, the configured provider is ignored and sign-in falls back to Eolymp accounts. The configuration itself isn't deleted, so restoring the plan restores the provider. See Why a section is missing.

What the console may edit

With Space Account, the space owns the credentials: you set a member's name, nickname, email, country, birthday and password from their Account card, and you can mint a sign-in link for someone who can't get in — see Disable, restrict and remove a member.

With every other provider the identity lives elsewhere. The Edit button on the Account card is replaced by a disabled External chip, name, nickname, email, country, birthday and password are read-only, and no password field is offered. Requests to change those details are ignored rather than refused, so a change that appears to save may simply not have happened. The person changes them where their account lives.

The space's own profile fields are unaffected: you can always edit those, whoever owns the identity.

How records get created

With Eolymp accounts, an external provider or your own database, a member record is created the first time someone signs in — provided sign-up is on. You can also create records ahead of time, so a person is recognised the moment they arrive: by Eolymp username, by OIDC subject or email, by Google Workspace email, or with a full set of credentials in your own database. See Add members.

Allow sign up

A switch captioned "Members can sign up and join the space on their own". Turn it off and people must be added by an administrator or admitted to a contest; a valid account at the provider is no longer enough on its own. This is separate from whether the space is visible to people who aren't signed in, which is space visibility.

Require email verification

A switch captioned "Members must verify their email address before accessing the space". Until a member confirms the address, they can't submit solutions, comment, vote, publish posts or ask questions. With it off, every member is treated as having a verified address.

The members list shows this per person: the email cell carries a green dot for a verified address and a red one for an unverified address.

Choosing one

Eolymp accounts are the least work — nobody has an extra password to remember, and you never handle credentials. Their cost is that the person's name, nickname and picture are theirs to change, not yours.

Your own user database is the choice when members can't be expected to hold an Eolymp account at all, or when you need to hand someone a login on the spot: it's the only setup where you can set a password, generate one, or issue a sign-in link.

Google Workspace and OpenID Connect suit an organisation whose people already sign in somewhere central, and where account creation and removal should follow that system rather than being done here.