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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Edit: I’m out of date for most of this. Way to go Signal team! See comments below my complainy post.

Forcing me to recite my PIN every few weeks is one of the most irritating UX I’ve seen.

I’m sure there’s some smart engineer explanation in terms of cryptography and being unable to recover it if lost. But just let me disable it if I’m okay losing my entire account if I forget it.

Also last time I checked the binding of a phone number to Signal was really bad. I had a friend abandon Signal and I could never sms them ever again.

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Huh? You can disable the PIN reminder in the settings if you want to. Or is that not available everywhere? It's working for me on Android and Windows.

I've disabled it as I store my PIN in my password manager.

Either that’s new or I’m just a loud bozo. Thanks for sharing!

I've been using the feature for a couple months, but I haven't been using signal for much longer so I'm not sure. Before I thought of looking in the settings to disable the pin checks they really annoyed me too :)

It's new, I felt the same way for a long time.

You're definitely not a bozo. These defaults are the sort of things that need to be polished.

A simple one page screen on first install that asks a few questions would be a nice:

1. "Would you like to be nagged for your pin every few days?" - Yes/No

2. Are you moving from another device and would you like to restore from a backup? - Yes/No

etc...

Your last paragraph provides an insight I hadn't had; that is a serious problem. I personally appreciate the PIN repetition, as it encouraged me to use a code I had not used before, since I knew If be reminded to practice it now and then.

To send an SMS to a signal contact, press and hold the send button then from the popup select `Insecure SMS`.

Cool!

Is there a way to say “always use SMS because this signal contact isn’t on signal anymore”

It looks to me like it's a per contact switch, so I think that's what you want, yea :)

When you stop using signal, you can log in to the signal website and say "I'm no longer using Signal"; that will solve the problem with your Signal-using contacts. I just checked and it looks life you have to deregister your account from within the Signal app (ie, can't uninstall first). I'm pretty sure it used to be more lenient: I remember friends being able to deregister their numbers after the fact.

Are you sure you don't mean iMessage or something else?

As far as I know, Signal offers no such option on their website.

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