Let me clarify some details about accounts on BBS. Here’s a good summary from @beschizza:
So, if you had more than 50 comments on Disqus:
We reserved your username.
That username is tied to an email address.
Your BBS account has not been created yet. Please create your account before trying to log in. You’ll be able to set your full name and password at that time.
When you register on BBS, enter that same username and email address, and the sign up form will tell you that they match.
If you had less than 50 comments on Disqus:
Your old username has not been reserved.
Make a new BBS account. Try to use your old username, but there are no guarantees that it’s available.
Some other points:
You don’t need to make an account on meta.discourse.org. BBS is one of Discourse’s official partners, so it’s fully integrated with the Discourse nickname registry.
Disqus comments are not being moved to Discourse. They stay in Disqus.
Aw, that really sucks. UPDATE: I was informed they’ll still be within the html of the old pages. As long as they are still indexed by search engines (or there’s an internal way to search through them) and the links within the comments that link to other comments on other pages still work, then that’s great.
Hooray. Registering with my old email address worked for me!
Interesting that forgot password will not work while the username is reserved and that it will say that it has sent you a password regardless of what email address or username you use, but I’m just happy I managed to register.
Something that I just found out that is very important is that the e-mail you use is freaking case sensitive. So, if your old BoingBoing account was registered to RindanDude@goatse.cx, if you type rindandude@goatse.cx, it will tell you that the name is reserved and you can’t have it. Change it to RIndanDude@goatse.cx, and your name will suddenly become available.
Yes, which is technically the way it must be, say the people who debated and argued over these kinds of standards. It’s not just true with Discourse, it’s true of email addresses by definition.
Originally Discourse was not case sensitive with email addresses, and the open source community corrected our error. Plenty of email service providers like Gmail and Hotmail give us the convenience of allowing our email addresses to be case insensitive, but we can’t assume the same from all of them.
To those of you having trouble claiming your reserved usernames, don’t hesitate to send me (@neil) a private message or email. Let me know what username and email address(es) you’ve tried so I can help.
I can’t figure out how to PM you without having the old thread to reply to, @neil, but I have my account set up now. Thank you very much for your help!
It’s me, good ol’ gwailo_joe! I done tried to sign up with my old e-mail like a worthy chap; I even had me moniker recognized by the tubes and me ol’ password allowed me to pass on to this point.
But where, oh where are my hunneds o’ comments? Most of them were hardly worth unearthing, even to me…but a few were of some small personal value: did they died?
(ah…read…READ boy: ‘not being moved’. Got it)
I enjoy change about as much as a herpes outbreak.
Integrating Wordpress and Discourse histories is an unlikely prospect, but what we might be able to do is have it so that discourse profile includes a link to the wordpress comment archive for the user with the same email address. Just a dumb link that ‘just works’ if we set up wordpress archives right.
What did we have in MT? I vaguely remember being able to open a public list of anyone’s past comments. But I also vaguely remember that it tried to open them all at once and the computer would catch on fire.
I may be the only one with a domain where I use a bunch of different email addresses, but my problem was that I couldn’t remember WHICH address I used. Would have been nice if Discourse would have just sent the email to the registered address if you used the username (or if it distinguished between a bad email address or one that it doesn’t have).
I finally got set up that way, but FYI if anyone else likes to use a bunch of different email addresses on a single domain.
Everything – users and their comments alike! – originated in our installation of Movable Type 4. We moved everything over to Wordpress a year ago, including these native user accounts and their comments, but didn’t turn on commenting. Instead, we put in Disqus, which used a single-sign-on system so that people who logged into our Wordpress installation (commenters) would be automatically logged into Disqus, which invisibly set up special accounts for Boing Boing users that were just for use at Boing Boing.
Whenever comments were made on Boing Boing, they’d be synched to the wordpress database–slowly–so in principle nothing’s lost when we left Disqus. At least from users who had native Boing Boing accounts (i.e. accounts in our wordpress setup)
I’m curious about comments from random disqus accountholders who did not have BB accounts, and from people who used Disqus to log in using their twitter, google or facebook accounts.
Yeah, we wanted to support OpenID, but the lack of centralization on email = identity is a dealbreaker. We need login services that provides a validated email we can trust, otherwise it’s an awkward process of log in, then validate email in a second step.
No, you’re not the only one; I’m a catchall junkie as well. I never was able to reclaim my ‘reserved’ BB/Disqus account, in spite of knowing what username, email, and password(s) I had used (thanks Keychain.app!) But at least when I finally gave up on that effort I got lucky in the namespace landgrab.
OK… so, I read a piece on BoingBoing, then I have to go to a new page where the article is not displayed… I’m sure this is good for all kinds of reasons of which I’m unaware, but it’s a little strange and inconvenient to segregate article from comments. If a goal was to make commenting both inconvenient and feel less rewarding (sad little reward though it always was), well done! Again, reading this comment stream, there seem to be all kinds of technical reasons why you chose to do this. Hope it works.
