[aur-general] Registering, misspelling email, losing account

[Sascha Shaw]

Am 26. Juli 2015 22:01:11 MESZ, schrieb Igor Morozov <moroz at fastmail.com>:
>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 at fastmail.com

... or you could ask on the AUR mailing list, if some operator could help you with your problem. You inflate this issue beyond any reason. If you have an account problem, wait for a reasonable time and ask an Op. If you think the design is flawed, open a bug report for the project bug tracker in the main Arch bugzilla and propose a new mechanism.