If I recall correctly (there’s 3-4 fairly lengthy discussions on this topic) someone said that not having email as your identity tied to your Discourse Username can cause a ton of problems in practical use because people more easily associate their site identity with their email address.
To me my Username is an alias of my email address. If I can’t authenticate, I have a fallback plan, which is to use my email address (and if I’m not sure which one I used, I’ll try them all as I have only a handful of email accounts) to find out.
Whereas if you don’t have any external identity associated with your account, how can you recover lost or forgotten password except by using insecure approaches like “What’s your mother’s maiden name”.
My own thinking is this:
- I may prefer to not disclose my email address (not a big deal here, but I’m talking about forums in general)
- I may be willing to bear the risk of having my ID associated with a single external ID provider and give up on the convenience of being able to receive notifications, etc.