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A comment on Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me). Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me) by DanHulton on Wednesday August 26, 2009 @01:35PM (#787641)
The easiest way for people to remember their logins for sites is not to USE logins. Use EMAIL ADDRESSES instead. Then, if they forget their login, they just enter their email address and it auto-generates a "reset password" link.

Open ID is cool and all, but it's nowhere near frictionless enough for average people yet.

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Re:Ask HN: Steal my Ideas (or help me) by patio11 on Wednesday August 26, 2009 @02:04PM (#787702)
Words cannot express how much I agree with this advice for non-technical people. My users love it because its easy. (Really. They send letters.)

I love it because failed logins are minimal and requests to reset password even smaller. (Incidentally, rather than "reset password", I give people auto-login links which are guaranteed to be usable for at least one day, and then pop up a message on login telling them how to change their password. This eliminates any needless copy/pasting and supports my ~10 users who prefer to ALWAYS log in via the forgotten password feature. Hey, two of them paid money, I'm not about to complain.)

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