How to allow login of user through mobile number?

Hi,

Please let me know a step by step way to allow a login mechanism so that user can login using their mobile number ?

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No idea what you are talking about here but my guess is that you are asking for

Which is not implemented yet.

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Hi @sam thanks a lot for your quick revert on this, and really appreciate your pointer toward Two-factor authentication,
Actual I meant not a two factor authentication mechanism although a more simpler way like Twitter and Facbook using to allow user to Signup or login using their mobile number and user can use their mobile number like a user name to login next time whenever they visit, please have a look at the enclosed sceenshot of twitter login, then it will be more clear what I wanted to convey :smile: . Thanks

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AFAIK Discourse relies heavily (solely?) on email address for member authentication.
i.e. this is more of a Feature request, than Support?
Does the phone number have an email address with it?

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Agreed, it is kind of a feature request. Are there any other forums / discussion platforms that allow users to log in with phone numbers?

I don’t think Facebook and Twitter are good examples…

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I accessed discourse for more than 4 hours reading on mobile and also signed in through mobile. Will be good to have this feature.

An article to read on mobile internet from India.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/India-to-have-519-million-mobile-internet-users-by-FY18-Morgan-Stanley/articleshow/36656019.cms

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Do people really have that hard a time remembering their user name?

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Yeah I don’t see the value of logging in with a phone unless you can forget your password or use it for an extra security measure

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Depends which audience we talking about - India : Yes !

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This might be an idea for Discourse 2.0: pluggable identity providers.

After all, just about anything that can be used to reliably send messages to a user should be suitable as an identity; besides an email address, a mobile phone number or XMPP JID should work just as well. Logins would have to rely on passwords, but the second channel (SMS or XMPP, in these examples) can be used to reliably send activation and password reset tokens and even notifications, as long as there are alternative message templates that can deal with the size restrictions.

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Well, we already use OmniAuth so you can build OmniAuth strategies for whatever login methods are desired…

Sure, but in the end Discourse uses OAuth to fetch the user’s email address and still uses that to deliver notifications, confirmation / activation tokens and everything else.

Anyways, I was more or less playing devil’s advocate…

I’ve recently been poking around Discourse’s source tree to figure out how hard it’s be to implement notifications via Jabber/XMPP instead of email, hence the interest in the matter. :slight_smile:

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In Asia there’s a whole generation growing up with no email (they prefer FB, viber, whatsapp, wechat). But they have mobile numbers. Signup and login with a mobile number would be a great option for communities in Asia.

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I haven’t found this to be true. People still have email accounts even if they don’t prefer to use them.

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I’m sure @SurabhiDewra (who seems to be from India) means the same.

And I’m from Southeast Asia who works closely with youth.

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I hope it’s okay reviving this old topic, but I think this is a discussion worth revisiting. Working in telecom for emerging markets, I’m witnessing flows where new mobile users can get into the digital world without an email, and use the two most popular apps, Facebook and Whatsapp.

While I don’t think Discourse should need to develop a login mechanism with phone confirmation, I would like to think that the Facebook login mechanism could work even if the user does not have an email address. I just got new phone service today in Colombia and was able to get on to FB quite easily, but could not complete the FB login flow on Discourse without entering an email.

Perhaps a future feature would allow for the email field to be optional if the user is using FB authentication? or perhaps it could be filled with their Facebook address? username@facebook.com as a placeholder.

I’m trying to get more data on this topic, but I think we should keep an open mind that many of the new users just getting “online” today on their phones, will not actually have a need for an email address, as crazy as that might sound to us. Though I think they will have a FB account :wink: if Mark gets his way.

Just something to keep an eye on for now, and understand that our assumptions of the past will not necessarily hold true in the near future.

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Problematic since email is so core to what we do. A user without an email has no way to get notifications from us at all. A user without email has no unique identity since that is how they reset their password.

So…is email being at the core the real problem here?

Like others have mentioned previously, I find it hard to imagine users who do not have and cannot create an email address. That being said, I’ve grown up in the US, a “developed” country, where it was expected that I have an email account. I was given an account by the schools I attended (both secondary and college), and it is just an expected type of communication method here. I did not grow up in India, a country still considered “developing”, where access to a computer and the internet is not necessarily commonplace. Can users in India and other developing countries get an email address, yes, if they can already access FB and WhatsApp, they have internet access and can do so.

I guess the question (which is impossible to answer) is “will users in India and other developing countries get email addresses as internet access expands and improves, or is mobile the way of the future?”

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I may be missing the obvious, but if someone with a phone can not access the web to create an email account, how are they supposed to access a Discourse forum?

I think the issue is not that they can’t have an email address, but that they don’t. They have a FB account, see FB as a login option, and are then confused as to why an email address is still required.

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