the forum is full of spam :-/

http://springrts.com/springnetwork/forums/

that is jazcash.. ask him directly.

people don't realize how much work it is to keep bots out :\/

I halted progress on its development when I was told the member database for this official forum couldn't be used for it. The main reason people didn't/won't use it is because they have to register a new account. I don't play any Spring games any more but I'd still be happy to manage this forum if the interest was there for it.

I've cleaned up the spam multiple times and the captcha system broke twice which I thought I sorted but, evidently not. Happy to give you Admin rights if you want Abma? I just don't see the point if we can't use the same member database for it though. Even just duplicating the database would be enough.

It would give you everyone's accounts. Honestly a scary amount of people have everyone's account info.

this could be solved maybe by Single Sign-on or Openid

the problem with OpenID is, that it is inherently web based, and that is kind of a bad dependency, if you want to possibly use it for ALL spring related stuff that wants access to user info. otherwise i would like it.
from the Single-Sing-On wiki page, OTP and Kerberos sound usable, but.. i have no idea about the constraints and possible problems there.

What we have now is web based, it is after all a website

these two things are both websites, but i was talking about all things that might be interested in spring account info. this includes eg. all lobby stuff, and possibly games too.

Its perfectly possible to use OpenID in lobbies e.g. http://kin.klever.net/libopkele/#.TrUhzkNCqnA

guess what, i already knew that there are libraries for non web languages for OpenID. that does not change the fact i was stating.
maybe you should read about how OpenID works.
not everything is/has to be web based, but there is always the part that requires you to use a browser/web based tech, to authenticate. to force that on everything that is interested in account info, is a bad thing.

OpenID support would be great to have. Those few non-web things can just use their own username/password, just like they are doing now anyway. (Or they could have a single auth token that you have to copy paste from the website or so.)

Maybe combination:
Become an OpenID-provider our selfs, use an LDAP-backend (http://www.openid-ldap.org/) [or something similar] which all servers/apps can easily use, and that can easily and securely be replicated to other servers, or even be contacted remotely (LDAPS or KRB5).

There is also an OpenID-provider that uses PHP and a SQL DB (e.g. MySQL): http://sourceforge.net/projects/communityid/
This should make it easy to migrate your existing stuff, and also allows apps written in any language to connect to the user-DB with its preferred MySQL-API.