Flexible User Registration: Introducing Temporary Accounts to Discourse

Feature
1

Dear Discourse Development Team,

I am writing to propose a new feature for the Discourse forum software’s user registration system. This suggestion stems from a challenge we’ve encountered in our actual operations, and we hope it will capture your attention.

Background and Rationale:
Discourse currently relies heavily on email services for user registration and management. However, we’ve found that most of our potential users do not frequently use email. Even with email verification turned off, users still feel uncomfortable or hesitant about providing an email address. This has led many potential users to abandon registration, impacting our community’s growth and activity.

Based on this situation, we propose implementing a temporary account system with the following key features:

  1. Simplified Registration: Users can complete registration by only providing a username and password, without an email address.

  2. Limited Permissions: To ensure community safety, these temporary accounts will have certain functional restrictions.

  3. Time Limit: Temporary accounts will have a 3-day usage period from creation.

  4. Information Completion Mechanism: Users need to provide additional personal information (such as email) before the 3-day period ends to continue using the account.

  5. Automatic Cleanup: If users fail to complete their information within the specified period, the system will automatically delete the account and all related data, permanently removing it from the database.

Potential advantages of this feature:

  • Lowers the registration barrier for new users
  • Provides a temporary participation option for privacy-conscious users
  • Encourages more users to try and experience the platform
  • Maintains database cleanliness through the automatic cleanup mechanism

We believe this feature will help balance Discourse’s email-dependent nature with users’ actual habits, thereby improving platform accessibility and user engagement. It also provides site administrators with more flexible user management options.

We sincerely hope the development team will consider incorporating this feature in future version updates. We are also happy to provide more details or discuss possible implementation approaches.

We look forward to your reply and feedback. Thank you for your consideration.

3

I see the demand for that, but I’m not totally sure if they really undestand that. After a month they try login and will fail. And then an admin must deal with upset (pre-)user whos login credentials are broken.

I don’t know… this is an issue of trust, but generally it is totally normal that e-mail must be used. Sure, this could be choise of admins too. Just like I have de facto option not to use trust levels (I give right away higher trustlevel and freezing that).

But I would trust on Discourses way to clean unused accounts and keep those users on TL0. To get higher rights email must be given.

I reckon this is not the easiest task because it kind of breaks fundamental functionalities of Discourse. But I don’t know.

I would use such light version. If UX wouldn’t be too complex. But my needs has nothing to do with users’ unwillingness to give email, but to make whole process much easier and catching lurkers (do we have more correct name for those?)

4

I think you’ll have to be far more precise in your description of “certain functional restrictions”. Balancing an unverified user’s ability to meaningfully interact with the community without turning the feature into an abuser’s dream is going to be very difficult, and asking the Discourse team to do the work to thread that needle, in addition to the actual implementation work, is asking a lot, for a feature that I’m fairly sure will not see widespread adoption.

Also, I wonder if you’ve thought through the full implications of the “automatic cleanup”. By permanently deleting the account and all related data, you both have the problem that Jakke highlighted (a “temporary” user comes back a month later to find their contributions nuked), but the “holes” in conversations that are left by permanently deleting a user are significant (there’s a reason why users with non-trivial contributions are usually anonymised, rather than being deleted).

1 Like
5

I agree with you