HN create account removed from login page | Hacker News Reader

HN create account removed from login page

news.ycombinator.com

143 pointsleejw00t35458 comments

pg (or possibly another admin these days) will remove the create-account functionality if HN suddenly becomes very popular, as with the LinkedIn thread. I'm trying to find one of his comments where he mentions this, but there are 8,511 to wade through, and the obvious searches haven't found it yet.

edit: I may have misremembered; the first reference I've found was http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481174, but I'm still looking.

edit: Gave up looking. I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

I remember this too... pretty sure it had something to do with reddit.

It was the day of the SOPA blackout IIRC. Redditors were bored and looking for their hit of lolcats.

Bashing Reddit on HN? SO BRAVE

Does graying out a downvoted comment attract less or more attention to it?

Probably more. I'm looking at -40 from that comment alone, hah.

I also vote more :)

I tend to ignore slightly grayed out text. When I see a barely visible comment (such as mine!), my curiosity gets the best of me.

Here you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481174

That was a very classy way to say "I don't want reddit to do to HN what Digg did to reddit."

It was gone last night, before the LinkedIn news. I know because my session happened to expire and I noticed. At least 12 hours ago, possibly more.

FYI Metafilter does the same thing.

they also change a minimal amount - $5 i think - that discourages idle registration. i think it works well for them. maybe hn should consider it (it's not for profit - it's for the psychological "bump").

SomethingAwful forums does it too ($10 i think?) -- with the additional caveat that 'bad' posters can and do get banned.

The problem with Metafilter is that $5 over time hasn't scaled. It's been $5 since they implemented it way back when, and as the popularity of the site rose, $5 wasn't enough to stop people from registering to add their pointless commentary anyway.

A few years ago I used to really find value in their community and felt that the added registration fee filtered out people that were just there to give bad advice on the green or self-post on the blue, but for the two years or so, it seems as if paying such a little amount makes people even more likely to post crap because they feel some sense of validation or privilege after payment.

Additionally (since SA was mentioned), there are so few moderators at MF that subtle trolls and misinformation loudmouths are prevalent (some have been known for their antics for several years) and threads derail and turn into a get-off-my-lawn!-fest really quickly.

Yeah, but if you try to comment on something, it will prompt you to create an account.

Go ahead an log out of your account and try to comment on this link.

Indeed that whats I tried exactly. it also makes sense for "newslogin" page to show just that, a login.

works!

Also, OpenID has been removed. How do I login with my Google account?

You can't anymore. There was a post a few months ago that you should set a password on the site itself to be able to continue to log on in the future (future being now, since a couple of days or maybe even weeks already).

I'm glad I saw this, because I didn't have an email or password set up.

In the future, when a major feature like this is removed, it would be nice to see a banner across the top for people who will be affected.

I'm curious why they removed openid. This is relevant to a project I'm working on.. are there good reasons not to offer that as a sign-in option?

What are considered current "best practices" in building an account system?

Here's the initial thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3618082

My impression was it was more a feature of clickpass's implementation being outdated and requiring maintenance than OpenID not being useful, although there was sentiment that OpenID never gained enough traction and isn't the future anymore.

Simple, just do a password reset on your hn username and it forwards to your gmail account

Unless you can't because that box isn't there to do a password reset. Which, btw, is really frustrating as I just had to create a second account to write this. I used to use OpenID and now I can't login to my old account at all.

I had the same experience. Pretty frustrating when you don't know what's going on (I'm a pretty regular visitor and missed the OpenID thread) and then want to comment on something and BAM! You have to create a new account in order to do so.

Maybe a separate page for changes to this site? That way, if someone misses it on the front page, they don't get hung out to dry.

*updated for clarity

I'm surprised that http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html has not been updated on this important topic. How much would it help, though? There should be an RSS of it.

I almost got locked out when OpenID was removed, but later found accidentally that the logon is case sensitive, and that fixed the issue for me.

That is one fancy log in page...not even a "forgot password" link.

Its funny how defensive HN readers are. I love HN and its content but I'm just wondering why there isnt a forgot password link? Seriously...?

I wondered that for a while, too. But there is a forgot password link, actually. You just have to enter your username and leave the password field blank, and then hit "login." You'll then be presented with a link to get a newly-generated password in an email.

That's... intuitive.

It's not supposed to be, it's a hacker filter. Same with the color scheme, design, etc.

I think that it's not just blank passwords, incorrect ones too.

Hmm, I just get a "Bad login." response as usual - regardless of the browser.

Perhaps related....

The past few days I've gotten several emails from 'info@ycombinator.com' telling me that I have a new password. (I received several new passwords in the past few days.)

The header seems to indicate that the message was actually sent from news.ycombinator.com.

Are these legit? Why am I receiving them? Has anyone else got one?

I've ignored them for now.

If you try to log in with a valid username, but no password, you'll get a link to email yourself a newly generated password. The text of the email is:

New Hacker News pw: <new password>

So someone probably thinks they have your username and are wondering why they can't remember the password or receive an new password.

Far less likely is that someone could be trying to discover/exploit a timing attack on the forgotten password generation algorithm.

If HN replaces your password with a random one when requesting a forgot password, that's a great way to denial of service someone -- just keep requesting new passwords every 10 seconds and they'll never be able to login.

The better approach is to generate a secure password change link with an expiring change request token. Upon clicking the link, the token is validated and you're allowed to set a new password (or have one randomly generated). However, until the link is clicked and the token validated your old password should remain the same.

> Far less likely is that someone could be trying to discover/exploit a timing attack on the forgotten password generation algorithm.

Didn't somebody do that already?

It was the session cookie key not the password, and it wasn't really a timing attack in the sense the parent means.

But yeah http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976

I have been a tad out of the loop. Can someone clue me as to what LinkedIn thingy is being referred to?

Thanks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309

LinkedIn's password database leaked earlier today.

Thank you. I am short of sleep and just didn't put 2 and 2 together. Duh.

you can still create new account when submitting new content (while being logged off)

HN Search is broken too, or stopped updating circa 5 days ago…

…makes the site _much_ less useful for me, I must confess.

seriously... I have it as an autocomplete in chrome: hn[tab] and I can get community-vetted stuff ^_^

countdown to people selling HN invites like it's a damn torrent tracker </joke>

hopefully this maintenence takes care of the issue of the login page being unstyled. i always thought it was supposed to go in a popup on the same page, that would make sense given its unstyled markup.

I dont think we are going to see a single pop-up anytime soon on HN. (Quick edit: Site has minimal 'html/css only', _flat_ feel and pop-ups are a different breed.)

Noticed this today and assumed it was my local settings. Not that HN need to consult or communicate to users but was this announced?

I suspect you can still sign up but via another screen?

This is a change to the registration interface. It shouldn't impact most (any?) existing members...

The loss of openid button definitely affects existing members though...

This could just be maintenance. I can't imagine its good for YC's business model to shut down sign ups.

Please tell me more about YC's business model.

Convince everyone that node + mongo + backbone + bitcoin is the beginning and end of all software development, from systems software to scientific computing. Receive kickbacks.

HN is mainly goodwill for YC (any VC would pay a fortune to have HN and its audience).

So the parent comment seems to suggest that it's damaging to the goodwill of the site to disable signups.

If this was a permanent change, I'd agree, but it may be temporary, and it's not totally disabled (you can still signup by submitting content, as someone else wrote).

vladd, while I completely agree that "HN is mainly goodwill for YC," I think potentially your subsequent parenthetical statement shows misunderstanding of a different business model, the VC model. Or, maybe it was just ambiguous language easily misinterpreted by me (and, I'd assume, others as well).

Many content-based companies would love to acquire HN and its audience (e.g. Conde Nast's Reddit acquisition). VCs would love to invest in an HN spin-out to reap returns from said investment via a sale of the entity. However, "VCs would pay a fortune to have HN and its audience," reads more like VC-as-owner/PE rather than VC as investor.

Maybe I'm digging too deep in the semantics here, but this seems to be a point that is often lost and VCs vaunted (or derided) as less investors-cum-advisors and more private equity slash-and-burn corporate raiders.

Might a VC chime in here?

*edited for spell check and readability.

Er, no. HN is part of YC's screening and application process. You have to have an HN account to apply to YC and if you have been an active user, your comments here basically become part of the screening process. It is part of why HN is better behaved than a lot of forums: Being an asshole here can help close doors for some folks which are potentially worth million$.*

* At least, this was all true last I heard. I have not looked at their application or application rules/process recently.

- Get users to sign up.

- They post/comment on news items.

- ????

- Profit.

Maybe they could start featuring a daily paid job posting on HN if they want revenue.

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