from Hacker News

I want my users to prove their identity, or at least go some way towards establishing trust by saying "see I can be trusted, look, these is my LinkedIn account and this is my GitHub account".

I could possibnly do this my requiring them to sign in via Oauth to those sites, but maybe it would be easier to give the user a random string and get them to put it somewhere like on a public github page, thereby proviong that they own the account.

I'm not sure, maybe there is somewhere on LinkedIn that a string could be placed that proves the user owns the account.

What do you think of that idea?