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.
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.
Who does that?
I have seen instances ask for very long essays before, maybe they stopped doing it or aren’t around anymore but really the idea of interviewing users before signup isn’t conducive to having a social platform with a thriving userbase, it’s conducive to having small private clubs.
Some idiot is probably going to say something about growth not being important but that is blatantly not true, no one wants to use a platform with a small handful of people in it, and normies aren’t going to want to join a platform they have to beg to join. It’s better than invite only like Tildes sure, but not by much.