Get the highlights in your inbox every week.
Opensource.com website updates 2020 | Opensource.com
Opensource.com website updates 2020
Website updates for new and existing user accounts, and more, for a more sage community experience.

Seth Kenlon, CC BY-SA 4.0
We've made some recent updates to Opensource.com that impact account registration, user profiles, and how readers comment on articles. These new and modified processes should ensure a more secure and safe website and experience for you.
Over the last few weeks, we've been really busy updating and testing these new features. One is our new account creation process to reduce spam. We deployed these changes to our production environment earlier today.
Here is a more detailed account of all of the changes we've made.
User account login
For those of you with an existing account, you will need to agree to the site Terms & Conditions the next time you log in. On the backend, we only made changes to the formatting, we did not make any material changes to the Terms & Conditions. Fun fact: The Drupal "legal" module is responsible for this behavior.
User account creation
Readers and visitors to the site will now only need to provide their username and email, accept the community Terms & Conditions, and then pass the "I'm not a robot" CAPTCHA process (fire hydrants, crosswalks, and traffic lights, oh my!). After completing that process, you will then get an email with a one-time login link that is valid for 24-hours. Once you click the one-time login link and confirm your email address, you will be able to set a password and complete the rest of your profile.
Account profiles
Profiles will still be visible and searchable, however, the biography (bio) portion (named the About section in the user profile) will only display for our community authors and Correspondents.
The bio section is now limited to 1,000 characters. If an existing bio is more than 1,000 characters, the bio is trimmed and includes an ellipsis... at the end. Please check your profile to make sure it displays how you expect it to, particularly if you are an author on the site.
Commenting on articles
We made the decision to remove anonymous comments. In the early days of Opensource.com, we felt it was important to have them for increased engagement, but as we've grown, we are seeing a heavy increase in bots and malicious attempts to promote unwanted content and messages on our site (spam). Starting today, a reader must log in or register to comment.
In addition to this, we will only allow plain text comments, which means no markup or clickable links. Be creative and know that any links you want to share will be plain text and not indexable by search bots.
If there are any questions, I'd be happy to try and address them in the comments. We hope you appreciate these changes for a better and safer community experience
5 Comments, Register or Log in to post a comment.
My old password doesn't work anymore?
I reset it, got the email, clicked the link and set a new password.
Logged out, tried the new pasword, didn't work!
Any help appreciated.
Hi Ricardo, sorry you are having trouble with this. I've tested the reset password options and it appears to be working again. Can you give it another try and let me know?
Hi Jason, thakns for looking into it.
Unfortunately it's still not working for me. I just logged in again with the "one time reset link".
Also, I didn't receive your response via e-mail, maybe there's something more to it?
I'm going to try a simpler password. Maybe the system doesn't like the one I'm using?
Just to provide a hint to other users affected by this: My problem was that I was trying to login with my email address when I shhould be using my name.
Thank you Jason for your support!
Another update. Just last week, we found a new modules that will allow users to login with their email address again. So we tested it and deployed it to production. You should now be able to login with your email address or username.