1044260 - no way to reply to a question without asking one first

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1004969

(support.mozilla.org :: Users and Groups, task)

Description

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

Recently I needed help with Firefox, and found several questions on SUMO that were relevant and already had replies on them- some with no solution yet. I wanted to reply to add additional details that may help solve the problem.

However, there's no way for me to do this. In order to reply, you must sign in... which means you have to already have an account... which you can only create by first asking a question.

Okay, fine... so I start to just ask the question- this is bad because I know it will be a duplicate, but I see no other way to create an account. Partway through asking the question, it suggests I may find help in the other questions that are already open!

As a user, this is intensely frustrating. It sends a very mixed message. Should people do the good netizen thing and reply on the open questions (avoid duplicates), or open a new question regardless of existing ones on the same topic? The Ask a Question wizard implies the former (and this is clearly the right solution), but the inability to reply without an account demands the latter.

It should be possible make an account without asking a question. IMO, a good place to put such a "create account" link would be on the signin page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/users/auth.

Comment 1

[moses]

Ideally, a user only comes onto SUMO for one thing which is to ask a question. So normally, they go through the AAQ flow then they are asked to create an account to post the question.

I agree that SUMO should have a "register" link from the sign-in page. Preferably https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/users/authcontributor. Using that link registers them as a contributor though. That's what most users do. 

I'm pretty sure this is a duplicate though. Ah! Found it.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1004969