Multiple users with a single email: Steven_Roberts is considering using Discourse for a co-op forum, but many users (kids) won’t have their own email addresses. He wants to allow login with a username and no email address.
Falco notes that email is central to the Discourse experience, but a workaround might be possible with another system for integration, like SSO. However, SSO won’t work as Discourse will be the primary system. Enabling social media sign-in could help, but it’s not a complete solution as it relies on user email addresses.
Falco emphasizes the challenge of managing users without email addresses, especially for underage kids.
Pfaffman proposes a potential workaround: using a single Gmail address with variations (e.g., gmailusername+fake-username1@gmail.com) to create multiple users, which could be managed by one adult. This method requires verification to prevent spam, and Pfaffman suggests exploring alternative verification methods to find an elegant solution.
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).