We are considering using Discourse for our co-op forum but one of the problems we’ve encountered with other forums is they require each user to have their own email address. In our forum many of our users will be kids, many of whom will not have email addresses of their own. What I’d like to do is allow them to login with a username and no email address. Is this possible or is there a hack or work around that we can use to make this work? I saw a similar post where someone was using fake email address but I’m hoping there is something more elegant.
SSO probably not going to solve as this will be the primary system. enabling Social Media sign-in would help a little bit but not the final solution I don’t think
Social Media uses the e-mail that comes back from then. Altough Facebook and Twitter let you set-up with a cellphone over an email, Discourse don’t. It’s the natural difference between centralized service and a distributed one. Someone gotta pay for the SMSs.
If this would be the primary system, and your main focus is under age kids I really don’t know what to do.
If it’s OK to have some adult create a bunch of users you could do something like
gmailusername+fake-username1@gmail.com
gmailusername+fake-username2@gmail.com
gmailusername+fake-username3@gmail.com
to create a class full of kids “owned” by one teacher/adult/responsible person. Would this work for you (I just verified that I was able to add the +whatever to my gmail address on my own forum to create multiple users with a single gmail address).
You need some way to verify that they are people and not spammers, right? How are you planning to do that? (Maybe knowing that will help come up with a way to solve the problem elegantly).