Patreon OAuth login doesn’t create user – hosted forum, valid patron, no errors

Support
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Hi Discourse Team,

we’re using your hosted Discourse service at https://forum.pahuyuth.com and have integrated the official Patreon plugin.

We’re encountering the following issue:

  • A new user is an active paying Patron in our €30/month tier (joined on April 20, 2025).
  • They attempt to log in via “Sign in with Patreon”.
  • The OAuth process completes:→ redirected to Patreon, clicks “Allow”, and is returned to the forum.
  • Result: Instead of being logged in or having an account created, the user is sent back to the login screen. No error message is shown.

We have:

  • Verified the Patron status
  • Captured a full screen recording of the login flow (linked below)
  • Checked the plugin settings – the integration is enabled, and everything looks correct on our side.

We reached out to team@discourse.org via email on May 7 and followed up on May 9, but understand that response times can vary. We’re posting here in hopes of getting some clarification.

Questions:

  1. We understand that valid Patreon logins should automatically create Discourse accounts – could something be preventing this from happening on hosted instances?
  2. Could something in the hosted environment or Patreon configuration be blocking the user creation?
  3. Is this something your team can verify or investigate on the backend?

Happy to share more details privately if needed.

Here is the login recording from the user’s perspective, showing the complete OAuth process and resulting redirect:

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Is your forum invite only or hasn’t another setting that keeps accounts from being created?

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Thanks Jay!

Yes – we’ve double-checked all relevant settings:

  • invite only is disabled
  • allow new registrations is disabled (intentionally – we only allow access via OAuth through Patreon)
  • login required is enabled
  • Patreon login is enabled and correctly configured

To clarify: this is a Patreon-only forum – all regular logins (e.g. local accounts) are disabled for users and only used internally for administrative purposes.

So from our side, there shouldn’t be anything preventing account creation for valid patrons.

Still, after a successful OAuth login via Patreon, the user is sent back to the login screen without an account being created.

Any further ideas what could be causing this?

Thanks again!

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5

I’m not sure if I understand your goals correctly. If you only want access via Patreon, why do you disable registrations in general instead of disabling Enable local logins?

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This is it. Unless you never want any new users, you need to change this.

You may want to disable local logins. that will allow new users who log in with Patreon, but not allow users to log in without Patreon.

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@Pahuyuth did this answer solve your problem? Looks correct to me!

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Update: Problem Resolved :white_check_mark:

Thanks again to everyone who offered input – and special thanks to @pfaffman for immediately pointing us in the right direction.

We’ve now identified and fixed the issue:

:wrench: The setting allow new registrations was indeed disabled in our hosted instance.

This blocked OAuth-based signups even though Patreon authentication itself was working properly. Here’s what we’ve confirmed:

  1. :white_check_mark: We successfully tested the entire signup and login flow using a completely new Patreon account.
  2. :white_check_mark: The user who originally brought the issue to our attention was also able to log in without any problems afterward.

Everything is functioning correctly now – users are being created and are added to the appropriate Patreon group as expected. :+1:

Thanks again for your help and support!

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