ending up on https://login.launchpad.net/+logout when logging out is confusing

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

When users log out they are taken to https://login.launchpad.net/+logout

This page has a link to the SSO home page and a message that they have been logged out.

It might be less confusing to have users end up on the Launchpad home page (perhaps with a session notification that they have been logged out).

[Diogo Matsubara (matsubara)]

Shouldn't logging out leave you at the same page? What's the rationale of logging out and redirect to the front page?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Logging in should keep you on the same page (as I reported and was fixed in bug 449), because often the reason for logging in is to access things that you were expecting to find on a particular page but which weren't there because you were logged out. This behavior should not regress.

When you log out, however, it is because you have finished using Launchpad. Therefore staying on the same page is not necessary. Sometimes it is not even possible, because the page on which you click "Log Out" is one you can access only while logged in. Taking you to the front page is not the only possibility (we could take you to /+login, for example), but it would be simple and consistent.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I disagree. Users logout to log back in as another user, or because they now want to use lp anonymously. There are no duplicates of this bug nore direct subscrbers. I think this is an unwanted feature.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The reason this report has no duplicates or subscribers is that it is not a feature (unwanted or otherwise), it is a proposed solution to five specific and boring bugs: bug 112776, bug 132428, bug 204562, bug 327965, and bug 428139. If the change I proposed here was implemented, those bugs *would* become duplicates. If it wasn't, those bugs would need to be fixed with five separate code changes (and there are probably other similar bugs that haven't been reported yet).

"Users logout to log back in as another user, or because they now want to use lp anonymously" seems like a use case only for Launchpad developers testing the Web interface. If a non-LP-developer wants to use a page as someone other than the person than they're logged in as now, it's probably because they're trying to abuse Launchpad -- for example, giving fake me-toos to a bug report.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Uhm, I often log out to change roles when testing things. So I'm not
sure that the assertion about logging out implies finished with
Launchpad. It implies finished with Launchpad as that account.

This doesn't mean your suggestion is wrong, but I don't think its a no-brainer.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Yes, I mentioned that in my previous comment: the main use case for staying on the same page at sign-out is if you're a Launchpad developer testing the Web interface. Perhaps there could be a special URL suffix for Launchpad developers to enter manually for that purpose, but it shouldn't interfere with everyone else.

It would be nice for person X to be able to see how a page containing X's private information looks to person Y. But merely signing out doesn't satisfy that case, because Launchpad shows more information to *anyone* who's signed in than it does to anyone who isn't signed in. To satisfy that case, we'd need an equivalent to Facebook's "Preview how your profile appears to a specific person" function.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I'm going to close this for a few reasons:
 - its not in and of itself a fix for the bugs mpt links - they are *not* due to the page that you end up on after logging out - they are due to the *way* that the logout code is structured.
 - all of those bugs are collapsed down to one critical bug anyway.
 - the page that we take people to now is https://login.launchpad.net/+logout which seems to meet all the criteria with one exception: its not the Launchpad home page.

@mpt, if you want to reopen this - thats fine by me; I suggest getting a more symptom based summary and description at that point though.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This bug report dates from the days before I realized that bug reports with "should" in their summary are usually confusing, and so it was in this case.

I still think that choosing "Log Out" should return you to the front page, for the same two reasons: it's surprising to new users that it doesn't, and the current behavior is unavoidably inconsistent. But the latter, at least, is probably better addressed in bug 112776.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Fair enough, I've reopened and focused it on the confusion aspect.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

the solution bug 451336 would allow us to choose a specific landing page on logout - pretty trivially.