788575 - Users cannot log in if their account does not have an associated email address

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Wiki pages, defect)

Description

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Many users have been reporting trouble logging in. In almost all cases, this is due to the fact that there is no email address associated with their account. I can fix the problem immediately by manually setting an their address manually though the Django admin panel and then asking them to use Persona to log in with that email address.

We should see if we can do something more to fix this issue. While the manual fix is pretty straightforward, it requires that people get in touch with us first -- and not all users will.

One idea (not necessarily the best idea): What if we copied account passwords from Mindtouch to over to Kuma? This would allow us to update the browserid_register age so that users could enter their username and (old) password to have their Persona email address associated with that account. The downside is that some users will not know their username or password.

Comment 1

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

(In reply to John Karahalis [:openjck] from comment #0)

Rather not copy passwords around. In hindsight we probably overlooked users who remained signed in for the entire year that we were migrating users as they signed in.

We need a way for a user to set their email address for *their* account but we need to verify its actually *their* account. I.e., don't let just anyone say "user01 is me, please set the email to [e-mail]"

How many is "many users"? If this happens multiple times a day we should do something now. If it's a couple times a week we should probably just document a manual process for setting the user's email so any MDN admin can do it.

Comment 2

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

I discussed the stats (bug 795092) with Ali yesterday, and we decided that the current approach -- asking people to submit a bug when they are having troubles -- is sufficient.