The easiest way for people to remember their logins for sites is not to USE logins. Use EMAIL ADDRESSES instead. Then, if they forget their login, they just enter their email address and it auto-generates a "reset password" link.

Open ID is cool and all, but it's nowhere near frictionless enough for average people yet.

Words cannot express how much I agree with this advice for non-technical people. My users love it because its easy. (Really. They send letters.)

I love it because failed logins are minimal and requests to reset password even smaller. (Incidentally, rather than "reset password", I give people auto-login links which are guaranteed to be usable for at least one day, and then pop up a message on login telling them how to change their password. This eliminates any needless copy/pasting and supports my ~10 users who prefer to ALWAYS log in via the forgotten password feature. Hey, two of them paid money, I'm not about to complain.)

The integration is the hardest part of this idea. There are a couple of different ways to go and I'm still not sure exactly which is best. I'm debating between integration with other software suites, building a small POS layer or making it easy for courses to handle it manually themselves. I'd like to do one thing really well, but we may need to broaden our horizons a bit.

You're region is lucky then. In my region every course uses a different system.

I would use Clickpass on top of Open ID, Clickpass seems fairly easy to understand, even if you don't fully get all the details.

why require an account?

with respect to the POS system, i'm curious on how opentable operates. does it interact with the various restaurant POS systems? seems like whatever they're doing works, and might be something to consider trying to emulate.

the main reason for an account is to allow edits, maybe there is a way around accounts though.

you're right about opentable, i'll take a look.

I happen to know that one particular company in this market has some sort of patent that they defend pretty aggressively. It's worth checking into the story for more detail.... http://www.hotel-online.com/News/PR2007_1st/Feb07_GolfSwitch...