What? So this is a big leap for Ma.gnolia and OpenID… everyone’s favorite social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia has changed their join and sign-in pages and will now require users to sign up with a verified identity before they can contribute to the Ma.gnolia community…

Why such a change? Here is an excerpt from their most recent newsletter…

“At SxSW, we shocked the crowd with the fact that some 75% of new accounts that Ma.gnolia needs to handle are generated by spammers using automated tools. This is old news to those who read Larry’s link spam expose from a couple months ago, but tuned attendees in to how much of a problem this is.

The changes to the Join and Sign-in pages will mark our move to OpenID 2. Existing members who sign in with a screen name and password can continue to do so. New members will need to use a verified identity. That means that new members will need to have an OpenId, or an ID with one of several popular services: Yahoo!, Facebook, LiveJournal, AIM, WordPress and more.

And that’s where we think things are going. It’s a small but important step towards not having to re-create profiles at every service we want to try out, creating less overhead for individual services and a better ratio of legitimate users to spammers.”

How is this a big step for OpenID? While this was a logical step for Ma.gnolia there are many sites that are on the fence about OpenID and this is an excellent example of WHY it is actually useful to not only support OpenID, but to require a verified identity like an OpenID before a new member can interact with your community…

As an added bonus Ma.gnolia has joined our affiliate program making it easy for new comers to get setup with their verified identity (an OpenID from myVidoop), and start posting their bookmarks as soon as possible.

Cheers to the Ma.gnolia team, feel free to drop by their online support channel to share your thoughts!