feature request: generate password on sign up

[Yuv]

In the process of evaluating Launchpad as a bug tracker for our Open Source project I collected feedback from our users that would potentially report bugs.

One of the biggest burden to them is account creation. Specifically password creation.

How about generating and displaying the initial password, rather than asking the user to fill two frustrating fields at sign up? Users can always change their password later on if they want to.

[Stuart Metcalfe (stuartmetcalfe)]

Thanks for the feature request! I've seen this approach on a number of systems and it *can* reduce the impedance on account creation if done right. I've also seen it done badly so we'd want to be careful to avoid that. In summary, I like your suggestion so it's definitely up for consideration but it won't see any activity for a while as we're going to need to gather statistics over time on the current approach, review other approaches to this and then do some pretty thorough design and user testing before we change the current process globally.

[Yuv (yuv)]

Thanks for the positive feedback.

Can you point me to a browsable view of the code that generates and handles the current signup form? What language is it written in?

I've filed a few other requests in the area of signup. I've been dealing with user's feedback on the joys of account creation and similar roadblock experiences for more than ten years and would like to explore the possibility to contribute to your design and user testing.

The best way known to me is to have multiple approaches implemented in parallel and test them in a usability lab (for the user) and a honeypot (for spambots). Implementation is cheap. Testing is key. I don't have the resources / scale to test. I do have the resources to contribute a modular design and implementation.

[David Owen (dsowen)]

On Fri, 2010-11-19 at 12:48 +0000, Yuv wrote:
> Can you point me to a browsable view of the code that generates and
> handles the current signup form? What language is it written in?

It's written in Python, relying heavily on the Django framework.

The portal to our main branch is at:

https://code.launchpad.net/~canonical-isd-hackers/canonical-identity-provider/2.x-trunk