Hacker News Reader

Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

I ended up losing access to my ancient account (it was using the OpenID providers that they don't even support anymore and the provider I used isn't around). I had gone fairly inactive, but recently wanted to contribute some content.

This was on the DIY stackoverflow, there's a fairly common problem on my stove, but an easy, low/no cost fix, it's just very involved. The DIY SO had a good discussion of the problem. To contribute back, I spent ~3 days making an instructional video on the replacement. Posted it to Youtube. Then went over to the SO to post it there as well, and realized it'd take like a month of dicking around to get a new account up to the point that I could post a response in the thread.

I reached out to site support about getting back into my old account, but have never heard back. <shrug>

View on HN

Glad to hear I'm not the only one that lost their S.O. account because they decided to try the amazing sounding OpenID.

Me too!

It’s been several years now but they had a long (1 year?) window where you could migrate to a supported login method.

Oh, I know it's entirely my fault for letting it be inactive and all, I'm not blaming them.

It IS unfortunate that there's both a fairly high barrier to entry AND apparently no real way to recover older accounts.

It's hard to justify the time investment to improving an existing answer on stackoverflow, when I've already posted it to Youtube and that's 95% of where I get my DIY education.

Backstory: SO has a post about this stove that has several people showing bad solders of one joint on a relay in the bowels of the stove (really, it took me and my son almost 2 hours to disassemble it to get to it). My video details disassembly, location, repair, and a quick reassembly. ~8 minutes of video. Sadly, people report most repair services just recommend you replace the whole stove, because replacement boards are ~$700, and you can't tell which of 3 boards until you've spent 2 hours on disassembly/reassembly. Most repair services aren't willing to re-solder a joint.

Here's the video I made, FYI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbxugIpIiS8

Didn't they have some way to transfer your account over from OpenID? Pretty sure I used it at the start as well, but now my account is a normal SO account.

Yeah I've very often had something of substance to contribute but lacked the "merit" (or points or whatever). I wonder how common that is and how it could be handled - i.e. differentiating against spam

Similar to me. Only when I actually needed to ask a question a while ago, I signed up again and found I no longer had enough points?!

There's a wealth of knowledge in old questions on that site, but UX for occasional users is poor!

> realized it'd take like a month of dicking around to get a new account up to the point that I could post a response in the thread

If you made a whole video just post it as an answer. That takes 1 rep (the lowest it can possibly be). If you wanted to post it in a comment ...well you needed 15 rep which is also pretty easy to get.

I don't understand this criticism of SO as if it is some walled garden and it's so hard to participate you may as well not.

Maybe I misunderstood what it would take, but one of the first things I saw was "account at least 30 days old". At this point, I guess I probably have that one covered, but at the time I didn't want this on my mind for a month.

SO doesn’t have threads.

Discussions are discouraged.

There are clearly people commenting here who don’t understand how the SO works, and haven’t bothered to read the FAQ.

This is exactly why SO needs restrictions on new accounts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com