Becoming a Member -- Registration

Get a different email? I don't know how this is since no email servers allow more than one of an email address. Unless someone put a fake one in to register to A2K.....

Thanks, Bella Dea. I think she might have decided to try that suggestion. Do you know if this has happened to anyone else?

Fake address wouldn't work. Memberships are held for confirmation.

So how could this have happened?

It's possible that your friend may have actually registered twice. They may have entered their info and not realized that the account needed to be validated and then tried to create it again in an effort to get in.

They'd get the message that the e-mail addy was already used if that was what had happened.

The mods can simply send the handle and password to the e-mail addy. It shouldn't be a problem.

Not exactly. We do not keep passwords. This is for members' own protection.

This person needs to contact the Help Desk by clicking Help in the lower right part of any page. They do not need to be logged in for this to work. Then someone on staff will do some investigating and determine what the problem is.

We will not answer these kinds of questions any other way (e. g. not through email), that's also for member protection so that passwords don't get bandied about, and because we have an all-volunteer staff and we need for our solutions to be able to scale so that we can handle all - gulp - 40,000 members of A2K.

Thanks for the heads up -- we will be happy to help this person via the Help Desk.

My point was that the person said "this is my e-mail address". If you reset the password and sent it along with the handle to that address, why wouldn't that be acceptable?

Anyway, I'm sure this will be resolved.

I think there's, perhaps, a disconnect of understanding between what the Help Desk does and what clicking "I forgot my password" does.

When you contact the Help Desk, you get volunteer humans. We try to help you. We handle more complicated inquiries. We also handle spam and other reports, and even requests to feature and defeature topics.

Clicking "I forgot my password" results in the software giving you a new, temporary password which you can then change once you get back into your account and go to your profile. No humans are involved (except, of course, for the actual A2K member).

But clicking "I forgot my password" means you need to know your userid. Since this person does not, their sole remedy is to contact the Help Desk and a person will look up the userid by hand. But we do not keep passwords. As I said above, this is for the protection of the users. We do not know your secret password(s), nor should we. This is a measure of security for our members.

I hope this clears things up. We are trying to help this member, and the path to helping them is through the Help Desk.