21–30 of 180 posts
The article mentions the tradeoff of username Vs email of increased willingness for people to sign up Vs losing the simple channel for password reset, but does not propose a solution outside of non-expiring cookies, which to me isn't really a satisfactory solution (though perhaps it works OK enough in practice for some types of use cases). In my view, for most applications, the upside is not really worth that downsid…
Have you considered that without email verification that a lot of those sign-ups were just bots?
Honestly, I hate managing accounts and passwords so much that I'll walk away when a "create an account" is thrown in my face. Login via Google / Facebook / Whatever is sometimes helpful, but it usually results in SPAM. For example, I logged into Redfin through Google and they immediately started spamming me. Other times, when I login through Facebook and disable sharing my email, the site that I'm trying to log into…
Honestly, I hate managing accounts and passwords so much that I'll walk away when a "create an account" is thrown in my face. Login via Google / Facebook / Whatever is sometimes helpful, but it usually results in SPAM. For example, I logged into Redfin through Google and they immediately started spamming me. Other times, when I login through Facebook and disable sharing my email, the site that I'm trying to log into…
How do you avoid getting spam to random addresses using catchall?
Instead of [everything]@example.com, I set up [everything]@yo.example.com. Discovering subdomains is much harder and the one time I encountered a form that didn't like a subdomain, I just made a forwarding address on my main domain.
Using Fastmail's rules, I have a setup where every message arriving to @yo.example.com gets shunted into a folder unless there's a different rule putting it somewhere else.
The article mentions the tradeoff of username Vs email of increased willingness for people to sign up Vs losing the simple channel for password reset, but does not propose a solution outside of non-expiring cookies, which to me isn't really a satisfactory solution (though perhaps it works OK enough in practice for some types of use cases). In my view, for most applications, the upside is not really worth that downsid…
Phone number, I guess. Sending SMS messages en masse is expensive or heavily regulated in much of the world and it doesn't particularly suit frequent "spamming" so people of a younger generation may be more willing to hand it over(?)
That's really interesting and definitely something worth trying. I wonder how the effectiveness of email changes with the goals for the user (play solitaire vs pay for a subscription, etc).
He does mention, somewhat off-handedly, that the lack of email makes password recovery harder. (Presumably impossible without some other communications channel like a phone number.) And you really need to be able to recover account access for a paid subscription. It's probably also reasonable to assume that if someone is going to give you a credit card number and address, they're probably OK with giving you an email.