Hello, everyone! So today I decided to contribute to AUR and register an account. I was pretty surprised by the fact that registration form asked me about SSH and PGP key information, but never asked me about password. At the moment, I was impressed. Not for long, though. I was pretty confused by the fact that I will receive a "reset password" email. Soon after that, I realized that it might be some kind of "account confirmation". The common way of confirming emails is using some "confirmation link". Keeping it simple, AUR got rid of such an ugly feature and basically confirms that email is correct by letting the email owner set the password. Great idea, right? Wrong. I would love to call it a great idea. It really follows "keep it simple" principle. Instead of implementing email confirmation, AUR seems to use the simple principle: "If you can set the password, you're definitely the legitimate owner". I would have supported this concept if it wasn't for one thing: I can't access my own account. That's right, I messed up. Instead of typing fastmail.com, I typed fastmai.com. And now there is no way I can access my account. The only option is to send an email to this mailing list describing my problem and hope that somebody will help me out. Basically, that's what I'm doing right now. People tend to make mistakes. I'm not the only one who messed up during registration. And there is no easy way to get our account back. Mailing list is not the best option for account recovery. What if the misspelled email exists and the owner decides to proceed and register? What if the owner decides to do nasty things using my username, full name and email that looks alike? That would affect my reputation in the community since it's difficult to prove that I was not the bad guy. The usual "account activation" prevents this stuff. A lot of web sites do not automatically log user in after account confirmation, so it kind of prevents malicious activity (the bad guy doesn't know the password, you see). I would love to see the community grow as much as I would love to get my account back, so I wrote this message in a way that might start a discussion. I might be wrong about "bad design", though. So I welcome replies that explain why this design is better than others. And by the way, the fact that you can use an unused (not registered) email in account recovery and not get any errors is frustrating. Took me 8 hours to realize that it says "okay", even though the email is not in use. Please, do something about it! -- Best regards, Igor Morozov moroz@fastmail.com