User ID?

[Brad Bernard]

How am I supposed to keep track of a linked account if I don't have an
ID for the tumblr account? The oauth tokens change everytime so I
can't tell if the same user signed in twice...

[Lucas Christian]

Same problem here.  My best guess was to use the /user/info "name" field, which is unique to the user, but the user can change it so it isn't perfect.

I would like to see user IDs too.

[Brad Bernard]

Yes I absolutely agree with you. It's surprising they did not include
it. Send them an email at a...@tumblr.com and see if they will respond.
I sent one but got no reply.

[Lucas Christian]

Did that a few weeks ago, I also got no reply.

[Brad Bernard]

It's very frustrating. I can't continue with my app without it. Such a
bummer.

[Henry]

+1 for REAL user id's

[Lucas Christian]

Thinking about this, I realized that what we really need is unique IDs for each blog. The user's ID would be the blog ID of their primary blog. 

Unique IDs would come in handy for much more than just users.  They would be essential if your app associated some locally stored data with a specific blog (such as a draft written while offline).  At the moment, all I could use to associate local data with a specific blog is the blog's short name, which is based on the blog's URL, which of course can be changed at any time.  Posts have an ID number, it should be simple enough to add them to blogs.

[Brad Bernard]

Yes that is why I just cannot continue with my app. I have to store
data and I just don't want duplicates and I can't track blogs or
users. It's really bad. We need a tumblr dev on this!

[diafygi]

Bumping this topic. A unique identifier is needed to allow users to sign in with their tumblr accounts. We have been trying to do this with the name, but that changes whenever the user changes their name in their settings, so then they can't log in, or may even log in as someone else who had that name and had previously connected it with our site. Has there been any progress towards a uid for users? Thanks!

-Daniel

[Felix Bonkoski]

I will second this, and agree that a unique ID per Tumblr account (*not* just the main account, but the *Sub-accounts as well*) would be a very useful feature.

These days, people change their Tumblr names as often as they change their clothes.

And it is very frustrating to a user who logs in to your application/etc, and you're like "Oh -- I don't know who you are, because now your name is different, and all the data I stored about you was keyed off of your Tumblr Name.  Can you please tell me what your old Tumblr name was?"

It's frustrating for the users, but more so for the developers.

Felix

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Felix Bonkoski

[Cal]

I use xAuth email and password to identify accounts if they change their url, but even those can change easily. 

+1 for IDs per account (you could just use the array index to identify sub-blogs, no?)

[Felix Bonkoski]

Who knows if the array indexes are stable? If someone adds a new sub-tumblr, or removes one, renames one? What happens to the indexes then?

I don't know the answer to that.

Felix

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Felix Bonkoski

[Yohn]

I'm also looking for a way to keep track of the users tumblr account even if they changed their username.. id numbers would be a huge plus.. preferably for me the unique id number of the user cause we can always call the blogs they own later.. but I need it so we dont keep creating multiple rows in the database for the same user.

has anyone came up with a way to get the users id number yet? or are we at a loss for this?

[Stephen Collins]

So after some digging for a recent project, I may have found evidence that Tumblr ALREADY maintains a unique ID for each user.

If you check out the markup for a "/archive" page, each post contains some interesting "data-" attributes, one of which is the "tumblelog-key," a 9-character ID that seems to be unique per-user.  I can only guess this is Tumbr's already existing ID for each user.  Now to find out how I can harness this.  The problem, of course, is that the link to the archive will change along with their name, so using that as a place to go for the ID is still sort of useless.

On Monday, August 8, 2011 3:37:58 AM UTC-4, Brad Bernard wrote:

[Jabari Hunt]

Bumping this up as well.  I'll take it a step further and say that a unique ID for each blog should be provided per access token.  When the user is prompted for authorization, they should be able to select which blog is authorized.  This would allow 3 things...

1. We'd have a surefire way of identifying users regardless of username changes.
   
2. Users would have a way of limiting access to specific blogs.
   
3. Blog names would no longer be required in endpoint URLs since the access token is attached to a specific blog (ie http://api.tumblr.com/v2/blog/post VS http://api.tumblr.com/v2/blog/BLOG.tumblr.com/post).

[Stephen Collins]

I'm all for this.  Granted, it would likely cause breaking changes in the API, but it would greatly simplify usage and enable a ton of other good users.

[Andrew Ice]

Honestly, it would be great for them to add a unique ID.  I've yet to see that they have.  However, you could create your own user-base system first.  The user should create an account on your site, and then add their tumblr to it.  This way, when they log in and url's have changed, etc, you check for it and update your current user, this goes for so many other assets too, followers, posts.  Yadda.

Some comments on this post are pretty old, but i've easily saved their token/secret into the database from the first time logging in.  Granted, it will change during the next log-in.

My biggest issue is adding their followers to the database.  If I track a user's followers, (aka by their url/uid), and they eventually change it, and someone else grabs that uid, then they could easily take place of the other user...

So a good way to fix this issue is to run a test.  (This is the only best possible solution I could think of.)  That before someone creates/connects an account it can test/compare their most recent post, with the uids most recent post, thus proving if they are, or are not, the user in question.

[Don Lee]

I just wanted to chime in here and say that having a unique, static UserID would be tremendously helpful.  Not providing this limits the API's usefulness.

Thanks,

Don