I’ve noticed several Redditors over in r/Lemmy and r/LemmyMigration who are experiencing issues with email verification on signup.
Examples:
- I can’t verify my email because the page doesn’t give me a button to do so. The link from my email just takes me to a blank page
- Unable to log in, got verification email, but go to log in and get a “bad password” message. Not getting password reset emails either. Junk/spam folders have nothing.
- Email never showed
- Can’t reset password
- Can’t register
I see several people in helping out as best they can in the comments, but I think it would probably be better if the relevant instance admins could reach out directly.
What is the best way to do this?
In order to maximize the number of users who join Lemmy, I think it is important that we streamline the sign-up process as much as possible. It would be unfortunate to miss out on potential users due to email issues.
In my experience, it’s mostly a combination of confusing Lemmy UI + user error:
- When using the e-mail verification link, Lemmy just shows a blank page with a tiny “e-mail verified” notification in the bottom left corner, which people miss. They then assume that it didn’t work, because all they see is a blank page.
- When opening the e-mail verification link multiple times, only the first time registers, and further attempts will generate confusing errors. This also makes people assume it didn’t work, but in reality, their e-mail got verified successfully.
- On lemm.ee, it’s very common for people to sign up with typos in their e-mail addresses (happens few times every week recently).
- We have a custom question on our sign-up page asking people to state they agree to our rules, and it’s relatively common that people just don’t read the question and write something random in there - we generally don’t accept such applications to try and weed out bots, but I’m pretty sure we also end up rejecting a bunch of legit users this way who just didn’t read the instructions.
Generally I’m happy to provide support to people in such cases if they reach out to me directly, but at the end of the day, the easiest and fastest solution if the account is truly stuck in limbo is just to create another account.
It’s a shame that there is so much potential friction on sign-up, but at the same time, I don’t see us reducing the friction on lemm.ee any time soon, because this is the lesser evil compared to bot sign-ups etc that we have seen in the past.
It’s a shame that there is so much potential friction on sign-up, but at the same time, I don’t see us reducing the friction on lemm.ee any time soon, because this is the lesser evil compared to bot sign-ups etc that we have seen in the past.
Is there any reason why an automoderation system isn’t used to weed out malicious actors, i.e. downvote trolls, spammers, people posting suspicious links. sh.itjust.works already does something like this on their server to deal with trolls, bots, and spammers. They can probably explain it better if you’re interested.
CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Even with an automod bot doing a lot of heavy lifting, we often manually ban spammers that slip past. And we have to review the bot’s actions for false positives, too, so we can revert those actions. It’s a very helpful tool but it isn’t perfect. I would not want to remove other tools (email verification, captcha) and rely only on the bot.
Email verification and captcha are good, they’re annoying and could be better but they’re still good. I was more thinking along the lines of not having a questionnaire with manual review, to be fair the way lemm.ee does it isn’t that bad but the way other instances do it by asking new users to play 20 questions or share their life story isn’t welcoming and will do more to hinder the migration from Reddit and adoption of the Fediverse.
play 20 questions or share their life story
Who does that?
- https://lemmy.ca/signup has 2 actual questions
- https://feddit.uk/signup has 1
- https://lemmy.zip/signup has 1
- https://discuss.tchncs.de/signup has 1
- https://feddit.org/signup has 1
We have automated a lot of this stuff on lemm.ee as well
@[email protected] In one thread, you mentioned that you have communication channels with admins to help deal with problems. Could those channels be leveraged for this?
Yeah, I’ll flag this up to the Admins in general.
Anyone can pass a message along directly - find out which instance it is, look up the Admins, find an active one and use the “secure messages” button to send messages on Matrix.
Might we compile a list of instance admin Reddit accounts? Then we could ping a relevant admin in a thread when a Redditor encounters a signup issue with a particular instance.
Great idea!
Any recommendations on how to go about this? Where should we store the list?
Store it on a post that’s linked to the sidebar.
