User authentication without registration - to the masses

In my article I want to discuss how to authenticate visitors to a small site without any effort on their part. Next, I will call the visitor the person sitting on the other side of the HTTP connection. The client will be called his browser. Perhaps the described method is already widely used somewhere, and I will be grateful to someone who will tell me about it.

Suppose that we have a website and the site has the task of distinguishing users from one another. At the same time, we know two facts: "the site visitor is lazy" and "the site visitor is shy." This means that he is too lazy to fill out even the OpenID form, and he will not register even more so. After a little reflection, we conclude that without registration (to one degree or another) we cannot distinguish one visitor from another, but we can distinguish between two different clients (for example, leaving some long-lived cookie). Thus, each client for us becomes unique - without any effort on the part of the visitor. Not bad.

Two minuses are immediately noticeable: the same visitor must somehow “glue” two accounts in order to identify themselves uniquely on different clients; the visitor loses such a familiar concept as login. If the first can be implemented technically (I will assume that not all visitors will "stick together" accounts, but at least one out of five), then the second can cause difficulties of a rather psychological nature: how will we visually distinguish one visitor from another? Assigning a ten-digit number is ugly, giving a picture a la Habrahabr is also not always convenient for everyone to use.

Probably, everyone should deal with this issue independently, focusing on the specifics of their project. On my site, for example, I generate a random pair Name Middle Name. Considering that I have about 130 names in my database (80 of them will be middle name), I get a good set of unique names for my visitors. In our society, contacting a stranger by first name is considered normal, therefore there should not be any problems. In the database, of course, I distinguish visitors by id.

Thus, we get the opportunity to identify the visitor on our own. If this method is too inconvenient for large projects, then for small sites like WordPress blogs, this option will work, because we get two obvious advantages: we remove anonymuses and allow visitors to use almost all the benefits of registered users. After all, everyone knows that the main thing is to hook the visitor with information, and he, grateful, will then register himself wherever they ask. And for starters, we get such a masquerade, if you want.