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There is a way to recover your account if your cookie is lost. http://stackoverflow.com/users/account-recovery http://stackoverflow.com/users/account-recovery
by kmontrose 16y ago
There is a way to recover your account if your cookie is lost.
http://stackoverflow.com/users/account-recovery http://stackoverflow.com/users/account-recovery
(this is linked from /users/login)
It does require that you provided a valid e-mail address at some point, which we don't require.
- nepenthe 16y agoIf this mechanism(link to a valid e-mail) is used to recover an account, is this considered a form of registration?
- kmontrose 16y agoNo, you can participate (well, post answers/questions; no rep is gained) as an unregistered user without giving us an e-mail address at all (or even giving us a bogus one, we don't check). If you do provide one, it lets you recover your cookie based account is all. The "account" is as throw away as you want it to be, basically.
- kylec 16y agoI just tried a test post and it won't let me proceed without putting an email address in.
- nepenthe 16y agoIt appears to do a basic regex to validate the e-mail address but does not require a confirmation e-mail to be sent to post comments.
- kmontrose 16y agoAh, my bad; been a long time since I've had to do anything as an unregistered user, mis-remembered. Looking at the code, we do require something that looks like an e-mail, for recovery purposes (I assume, that code predates me by a bit). It is not, however, verified.
- nepenthe 16y agoSorry I was not clear and it is not terribly important. I've just wondered what it actually means to be "registered." If I have recovered my cookie-based account it means the account has been verified by e-mail. I'm just wondering isn't that a form of registration without having to have used OpenID?
- kmontrose 16y agoIts mostly a distinction between "can login with one click (Registered with OpenId/Facebook)" and "can login with a crazy convoluted path (provide email [again], check email for link, etc.) (Unregistered)". You can get the lion's share of a Stack Exchange's utility without registering, and this is quite intentional.
- Stormbringer 16y agoHaving to do account recovery to recover the cookie is a perfectly valid technical response I guess. However since cookies are invisible, and account recovery is normally a big scary thing, it boils down to this: (a) the end user has lost something invisible that they didn't even know they had (b) the method of recovering the invisible token is to go to what is probably the last place they are going to look a + b = full retard // and you should never go full retard