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by tghw 2149 days ago
An email/password login is not difficult in the least.

And, frankly, there is zero chance I'm going to host a site with a provider who thinks it is.

2 comments

Eh. It's not "hard", it's "harder".

Evaluating mail delivery services and integrating with one; going through all API handlers to check that they handle the extra "signed up but email still unconfirmed" status the right way; handlers for resending email confirmations; the password reset flow. A lot of papercuts.

Oh, and later on — having to debug email delivery issues, which always happen eventually.

This is why adding another third-party auth option is much easier than adding an email signup flow.

An alternative is the "modern" email flow where you just get a sign-in email every single time you want to login, but that's meh. I'd rather have a proper "classic" email signup flow.

All this said, I admit that email signup is one of the basic features, and we're missing it. I want to have email signup too. I just don't think it's as easy (or even /almost/ as easy) as third-party auth, and the rest is a question of priorities.

Not that difficult, except that you need:

* sign up / sign in routes.

* reset password flow

* multifactor enrollment and validation

* email verification and email templates

* rate limits to prevent brute force attacks

There is a reason entire companies exist to solve this. Properly implementing your own login creates a lot of wasted development time, especially when OAUTH2 is an industry standard.