Getting UID easily

[Justin]

Afternoon,

This may be a simple oversight, but is there an easy way to get a
lender's UID, either by email address, name or otherwise? I'm assuming
most lenders don't know their UID off the top of their head :)

Justin

[skylar]

That's a great question. We built an application for Kiva staff that
uses the lender ID and as it turns out, a lot of them don't know this
either! I would expect only power users really know what this is.

However, what you can do is ask the user to paste in the URL to her
Kiva profile (or "lender page"). From there, you can just parse out
the Lender ID. It turns out, this is how we did this with our
application for the staff as well.

Cheers,
skylar

[Justin]

Thanks for the reply skylar,

It would be really useful to be able to use their email address or name (I see "shortname" is in the roadmap)

Otherwise, in the short term, what's the shortest way for a user to find their lender page url?

Thanks
Justin

[Skylar Woodward]

For privacy reasons we can't allow you to resolve a lender's information by email address.  A lender ID is a public-facing form of identification which can be changed at any time.  The user's email address is private information held in confidence between Kiva and the lender.

shortname = lender UID

The best way for a lender to get their ID is to visit:

https://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=account&action=lenderPageEdit

which should force them to log in.  They will see "My Lender Page URL" at the bottom of the page.  Another, slightly less reliable technique would for them to search for their profile with a web search (eg, "skylar kiva"). For example, the search below powered through Google yields all 701 lender page URLs for people named "Justin."  This is roughly equivalent to us having a lender/search API method:

http://www.google.com/search?q=lender+justin+site:kiva.org

[Justin]

Ick.

While I understand the privacy concern (thanks for keeping personal info private!), there has to be an easier way!

Perhaps some way to authorize via the API to grab the UID? If nothing else a URL that forces the person to log in, then shows only the UID so there's no scrolling and no confusion?

Thanks

Justin

[skylar]

Agreed! Ick. So we took your suggestion. Now you can point them
here instead:

http://www.kiva.org/myLenderId

After the user logs in, he'll see his Lender ID. (we decided to stop
using the "UID" terminology)

Cheers,
skylar

[Justin]

Hurray! My Hero :)

Thanks Skylar

Justin