Looks like gitlab now requires account verification for new accounts in addition to email. Either phone number or credit card.
This applies both to accounts created with a working email or by logging in using your github account. You can’t even verify your email until you go through step 1.
I don’t know when this started, but at least for the last month or two judging from these posts in the forums.
- https://forum.gitlab.com/t/how-to-create-an-account-without-telephone-number-if-an-non-activated-account-has-already-been-created-with-the-same-e-mail-address-that-demands-a-phone-number/93675/2
- https://forum.gitlab.com/t/phone-verification-sms-not-received-unable-to-login-and-register/92202
- https://forum.gitlab.com/t/how-to-create-an-account-without-telephone-number-if-an-non-activated-account-has-already-been-created-with-the-same-e-mail-address-that-demands-a-phone-number/93675/2
Fun fact: I don’t even want to host on gitlab, I just wanted to report bugs in some projects. So I’m locked out.
Some people seem to think that setting up send-email and mailing patches has too much of a learning curve and ‘barrier to entry’.
@intrepid @Slotos Indeed. I would love to live in a world where code collaboration is fully decentralized (we don’t even need SourceHut, btw), by hosting our repos on home servers and collaborating through git and emails (I already have the setup to do just that, with my Pi running lighttpd and postfix, and I would really enjoy it). But from what I’ve seen during my career, most contributors to FOSS are junior devs out to build up street cred (I would love to see actual stats on that). We need to make contributing the easiest possible to them, because they have a lot to learn at once and if we discouraged them, the world may very well collapse. :) (seriously, it’s kind of freaky to imagine what would happen if the stream of FOSS contributions would stop)
(disclaimer: I’m working on ActivityPub implementation for GitLab, as a contributor)
EDIT: note that by “contribution”, I mean very specifically developer contributing to the project of someone else. Most maintainers are older.