PlatformIO account creation from the forum

Advanced Solutions PlatformIO Account
1

This message is based on my “forum onboarding journey” which I found slightly tricky.

When a new PlatformIO user arrives on the forum, he/she is quite soon greeted with an invitation to sign up for an account thanks to the Discourse onboarding feature (which displays a signing up invitation after spending some time reading a thread). On all Discourse forum I’ve used, I found a way to register, thanks to separate “Sign Up” and “Log In” buttons. However, on PlatformIO forum, there is only the “Log In” button (I guess for good reasons which I don’t know). This gets quite misleading with the sign up invitation that discourse places at the end of a long-visite thread → it redirect to the login page (https://auth.accounts.platformio.org/…)

Also, that login page gives no information as to how to register, so that the user which wants to register is let in a dead end:

Pioaccount login page
Pioaccount login page900×1153 84.1 KB

In the end, only a web search can bring a new user to the PlatformIO Account doc page, where I learned that the easiest way to register is through the Pio account panel in VSCode.

I find this new user onboarding journey unncessarily nonlinear. I suggest the following changes:

Simple changes:

  • add a link to PlatformIO Account doc doc page on the log in page (https://auth.accounts.platformio.org/…). Something like “Don’t have an account yet, see the doc for how to register”
  • on PlatformIO Account doc, add a short sentence specifically on how to register. Something like: “registration of a new PIO account can be done either through the VSCode extension or using the CLI”

Then on a second step, which may require more work (and perhaps there are good reason to not allow this): enable PIO account creation from a regular webpage, instead of requiring connecting through VSCode or through the CLI. But perhaps this should be formulated as a question: are there advantages to prefer user registrating through VSCode?

Final thought: I had to rewrite this post, because new users can only posts up to two links. And this is despite my account having been manually approved and all my links poiting to the platformio.org domain…

2

Good point. We did have the “Create a new account” link on the “Login” page a few days ago. Right now, the forum is under a big spam attack, so we turned it off for a while. You can still sign in or register using the social login options we support. We will bring back all the old registration methods soon.

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Thanks for the feedback and sorry to hear about that you have to deal with the pain of spam. Indeed I forgot to mention about the social login.

Since re-enabling account creation is paused now, do you have a feedback on my first two propositions (add link to PlatformIO Account doc page on the login page and clarify a bit that page). For the second one, I can submit a PR.