Verification by phone number

[Juraj_Štefánik]

Hello, Is it possible to add a phone number option to user verification?

Thank you

[Decorbuz]

No, that isn’t possible.

Phone required for registration?

Many years ago, there was a long discussion about allowing such a feature. It didn’t go anywhere, but it’s definitely worth reading if you’re interested.

[SaraDev (Sara Devlaeminck)]

User verification by phone number is not recommended.

@codinghorror

The issue is:

How do we treat a phone number like an email address?

Let’s go all the way here. Full conversion. Zero email. Only the mobile number for a user. To what extent can you treat a mobile number like an email address? To what extent can you replace an email address with a mobile number?

• Identity? Every mobile number is unique, so that sort of works. You can change mobile numbers about as easily as you can change email addresses, or you can stick with them for long periods of time.
• Notifications? Unlike email, It’s not free to send a SMS to a phone number. Say someone forgets their password or needs a reply notification. We have to send SMS because that’s literally all we have. Well SMS messages cost, like, real money. Sending email is as free as it gets… but SMS ain’t free. How would the average Discourse open source install deal with this?

That’s the way to think about this. There are some massive obstacles.

If you’re looking for a way to discourage spammers from signing up for you site, Discourse already has a lot of protections in place to make things annoying for malicious users.

@awesomerobot

For example, you can restrict permissions on new users so they can’t post links or images until they’ve used the site for a little while. You also have the option to configure Akismet for your forum, which will scan all new posts and user bios for spam, and automatically flag possible spam posts for review.

There’s also a third-party plugin that integrates with Stop Forum Spam