Recent changes to the signup form

It seems there have been some changes to the signup form recently…?

Relevant to this topic: Required fields not shown as required🞲 during sign up

No fields are marked as required.

Tangent to that topic:

Field instructions—which I think used to be static—are now shown only when a field has focus. Which is fine, but instructions only show for Email:
image

None of the other fields’ instruction text appears:

Also, the tab order is… out of order.

These strike me as minor fixes – I hope we can get this “first impression” space touched up!

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That is correct. We have pivoted to only marking fields that are optional as such, while all other fields can be considered required by default. The logic behind it is, most fields are required so it cuts down on noise.

There’s pro and cons and endless discussion online amongst the designer community, but that’s the approach we’re taking.

I think we decided to drop the other instructions, as they weren’t very useful.

The username instruction used to be:
CleanShot 2024-11-14 at 15.29.09@2x

I think everyone is by now aware a username is an unique identifier without spaces.

That’s a worse issue. I just tried though, and it seems to work as expected. A recording would be helpful to see the issue.

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Thanks for clarifying re. the markings and instructions. I’d had some custom field instructions EDIT: customized instructions for fields that I miss a bit, but I’ll live.

As to the tab order, it seems my issue may be that the fields are out of order. Meta’s own signup form matches several other forums I frequent, but mine has Name appearing before Password. So tab skips from Username down to Password then back up to Name.

I can’t figure out what I might’ve done to achieve this, or how to un-achieve it… :thinking:

Meta:

Me:

The custom user field descriptions should behave the same as email, do they no longer show up for you?

The only thing I can immediately think of is using the order property of the flexbox to change it?

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Nope – instruction text only shows up for email, and it it’s there regardless of whether I customize it or leave it at default. Instructions for other fields don’t show no matter what I do.

Also nope – I’ve done nothing like that.

I’m on tests-passed 3.4.0.beta3-dev (20effebd51) as of 24 hours ago. I see there are, as always, more recent commits for me to pick up, but nothing looks like a tweak to the signup form…

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So to be clear were on the same page:

You have custom user fields with a field description like this:

And on focus the description does not show up:

About the order… odd. I won’t know more until I can take a look at the actual page. If you want to give me the link to your site?

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I think it’s the one linked in the profile https://forum.tasat.org/

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Perfect thanks, taking a look

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Okay, I see this is our code, but it only applies to non full-page login forms, which is why there is a difference between your site (not full page) and meta (full page).

Not sure why that change is there, will check internally and get back to you.

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@ToddZ is the full name required site setting enabled at your forum? I think that moves the name field above the password field

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@chapoi - I introduced some confusion by saying “custom field instructions” – I meant I had customized some default field instructions. I have no ‘user custom fields’.

@moin - I did have full name required enabled. Disabling this does change the field order back to match the tab order. I’m ambivalent about requiring the name, but either way the field order & tab order should match.

And I had missed the full page login screen announcement, but switching over to that confirms that the ordering issue is the same.

(Not huge stuff, but I appreciate the attention to the topic!)

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Hi @ToddZ! I made an initial commit to fix some of the issues you mentioned: FIX: Signup fields tab order and descriptions (#29772) · discourse/discourse@876591f · GitHub

Now, the tab order should be correct regardless of whether the full name required site setting is enabled or not. I also ensured that field descriptions are always shown, not just when the input is focused.

Our aim with the recent changes was to simplify the login experience. We removed the field descriptions that we felt added little value, but we also understand that customers may want to customize this. We are planning to add an option for site owners to include custom descriptions if they choose.

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Thank you, Jan! I’ll look forward to picking up the updates.

The simplifications make sense – it was just a bit puzzling that the site texts for instructions were available in the system but didn’t do anything.

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Hi @ToddZ, sorry for the delay. I ended up adding the descriptions back, but they are hidden by default. You can toggle their visibility with these site settings:

show_signup_form_email_instructions
show_signup_form_username_instructions
show_signup_form_full_name_instructions
show_signup_form_password_instructions

Then, you can replace the text as you did before. The locales remain the same as before. Let me know if you have any other issues.