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In lugnet.general, Tim Courtney writes:
> There's nothing pointing people on the front page to 'sign up for discussion
> groups.'
That's a really good point. We should make this a lot easier to find.
> Having essentially two different ways to gain an 'account' on LUGNET isn't
> that inviting, unless you're in the know as to how it works. Ideally, people
> should be able to sign up for a free account, get a member number, and be
> able to configure posting from that account (or something similar). Then,
> if/when they want to pay to get the extra features, they do so, and their
> account is upgraded. One login, one place to configure all settings.
This would be ideal. All the sign-up and set-up stuff is sorely overdue for
a rework. I'll be giving this some serious attention in May when I get back
from San Francisco. As some have noticed, we've begun to migrate member-ish
things over to members.lugnet.com and this is also the right time to narrow
the gap between discussion group sign-ups and paid membership sign-ups. If
we create a "discussion group account" that can be upgraded to a membership,
then we can make it be a million times easier to tie together multiple
e-mail addresses.
[Tim and I outlined a migration path a couple years ago which basically puts
everyone into the category of "member" but with differing types.]
In order for things to become sane, I think we need to phase out the current
"news posting setup" and at the same time simplify the current membership
sign-up form -- merging the two. What we call a "member" now would then be a
special type of member beyond the basic (the basic being a discussion group
posting account).
I think if we had the concept of a "basic membership" (free, no frills, just
news posting) and a "full membership" (paid -- same as current memberships)
and, as Tim suggests above, have one place to configure it all, then this
would hugely simplify things for everyone.
We could then:
- eliminate the current news-posting-setup form
- make it easy to select from multiple from-adresses on-the-fly at post-time
- easily link to member pages/profiles from news articles, based on author
- list news users in the member directory
And I just had a thought: a basic membership wouldn't even need a password
or a sign-in, since a confirmation e-mail could be sent for any changes --
even for chaining two or more e-mail addresses together under the same basic
membership.
> [...] If I understand him correctly,
> he has paid the $10 twice to try to gain access to LUGNET newsgroups, simply
> because he didn't understand the browser setup process [...]
Oh that's embarassing. Would you send me his name and I'll check through my
e-mail archives. On my to-do list for May, BTW, is to automate password
resets, similar to the way news-posting authentication works.
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: posting setup
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| (...) Yep, I've noticed (in fact, I think I was a catalyst, from some recent mails) ;-) Thanks for this! (...) I would much appreciate a feature to easily be able to post from multiple addresses! When I fanned out, and added a brickmedia.com and an (...) (22 years ago, 18-Apr-03, to lugnet.general, lugnet.admin.suggestions)
| | | Re: posting setup
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| (...) I agree, and with good reason. Until just now I was under the impression that a paid membership WAS required. After seeing the link to the membership sign-up page, it never even occured to me that it wasn't required for posting. I've even had (...) (22 years ago, 27-Apr-03, to lugnet.general, lugnet.admin.suggestions)
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