Password reset
I don't need to reset my password, and I really appreciate the way that it is done to maximize anonymity. However, I think there is a bit of a problem with how it is done in terms of users getting locked out.
If you're locked out, as far as I can tell, there is no way to view the email hint associated with your account. It seems a bit counter intuitive to me that in order to see the hint for how to regain access to your account, you have to already have that access! I also think that it won't work in the case that someone has been away for a few months and has forgotten their password. I'm not sure what a good way of displaying the hint would be, however, since if it is done by username anyone who has seen your posts can look at your password hint.
Hopefully with a bit of discussion we can cook something up that can solve this catch 22!
I just encountered a scare here. I use a password management and I registered on my phone and it never sent it to my desktop so I thought that I may have been locked out. I thought this because I didn't realize there was a 'password recovery' option that I needed to review in my account.
It might be good to take the user through that option as an onboarding process to provide the option for people who like permanent accounts.
Unless someone forgets both their password & email address this issue is rather moot, is it not? The description is not really a part of the account recovery process itself, it's just an email address alias so you know you properly added one and which that was.
For me the problem is that I have 3 email addresses I use daily, another that I have as a throwaway, and I have had a few associated with schools that I have now lost access to since graduation. I personally use a password manager so it is pretty unlikely that I would forget my password.
However, if someone forgot the password they used every time they logged in, they probably also forgot which email address they associated their account with. Associating an email is something you might do once at the beginning and never touch again. I suppose they could just send an email from every email account they think they might have used, though that's not a terribly elegant way of doing it.
I hope I explained my concern a little more clearly, I'm not sure I really got at the problem in my original post.
I get where you're coming from but to a certain extent if someone forgets both their password and also completely forgets their email address (especially because we only store a hash of it for comparison's sake) they are kind of boned and there is not much we can do about it.
Any system where we send out the email description to an unverified person can be exploited, especially because people are often idiots and basically spell out their email address in it even though they're not supposed to. You also have to keep in mind that it's called a "description" for a reason... it's not meant to be a hint for recovery purposes.
However, if you can come up with a system that is not exploitable/breachable (like security questions are) and does not potentially expose our users' private data to an unverified individual, that can also somehow remind them of their email address should they forget it (even though we don't store it in any recoverable form) we are open to considering it.
I think from what you are saying and from /u/Kenny 's comment above, that the system is good as it is. However, it should be more explicit to new users that there is no external hint. That way there's no surprises for them in the event that they do forget their password.
Fair enough and good point. I added it to our issue tracker to try and find a way to make it more clear that account recovery is 100% reliant on you setting up the email address recovery in user settings.