The discussion revolves around the potential development of an official “Sign in with WeChat” plugin for Discourse, given WeChat’s massive user base in China. snakeninny highlights the demand for such a feature, referencing a previously broken plugin. hawm notes that WeChat doesn’t provide email addresses to developers, making user registration challenging. snakeninny counters that users can link emails to their WeChat accounts, but hawm reiterates that without access to the linked email, the process would be cumbersome for users. The conversation concludes with snakeninny acknowledging the limitation and agreeing that the feature may not be viable without official email access from WeChat.
As you know, WeChat, which has over 1.2 billion users since 2011, is currently the biggest messaging and social platform app in China. For those Discourse users who happen to be Chinese, they are WeChat users for sure.
Naturally here comes to a demand of “Sign in with WeChat”, just like “Sign in with Apple”. Actually we used to have WeChat Login Plugin, but it is already broken for 6 years, with full of bugs.
Based on this situation, do you have any plan to develop an official “Sign in with WeChat” plugin?
Although most Chinese apps and neitizens prefer to phone number rather than email, WeChat does provide a way to link to email for security. It’s not mandatory, but most young people, especially the white collars will do.
So I think the process is quite straightforward: sign in with WeChat, if the user has already linked an email, go ahead; otherwise require for a new email because of Discourse.
WeChat doesn’t provide the linked email address to the developer as I know.
Of cause, we can always prompt the user to enter an email address after scanning the QR code to login then require the user to verify it that’s what I said link to an existing account. But do we really benefit from it? Or just annoy the users?
That’s the key I agree with you that If WeChat doesn’t officially provide a linked email address, WeChat is quite useless and will annoy the users. Forget about it. Thanks!
I agree with you that If WeChat doesn’t officially provide a linked email address, WeChat is quite useless and will annoy the users. Forget about it. Thanks!