It's been over a year since I had a dire need to ask a question on these forums. As usual, I cannot log in with my email address and password, it has to be my USERNAME and password. Naturally my username and my forum name are different too. Really I have no idea whatsoever my username is. At this point it's pretty much a second password. No problem lets recover the password via email...just enter your username and email address! I don't know my username! I'd honestly have better odds at guessing the email and password than the email and username at this point. Hey maybe I'm lucky and my account has been inactive too long or deactivated for some other reason and I can create a new one using my usual email address. Nope..the email is already registered! OK, well....I'll just have to email an admin or something to ask for manual assistance.......but there is no link that I can see anywhere on any of the login error or password reset screens

So here I am now with my fresh new account registered with a spam mail account I had to abandon back in 2001 because there were just too many Nigerian Prince and viagra emails flooding my box. I see now that the username is one of a handful of predefined formats of my "real name", which is of course something that I do not prefer to go spreading all over the internet because I was born before 1985 and I still believe in some degree of anonynmity online. Even if I did register with my real name, after a year of inactivity, the odds of me remembering this strange auto generated username I did not create myself is pretty slim. The fact that there are a half dozen auto generated username formats actually makes it more difficult for me to guess, even if I do know my real name. Is it bobbarker, bbarker, barkerb, barkerbob, bobbar? Who knows?! Certainly not me.

Anyway...I'm not trying to sound like I'm yelling or anything.....I just wanted to give some feedback on the login experience and how difficult it made my life. I've registered and logged into many forums, but this one has by far the most bizaar setup I've had to use yet. And to top it all off...at no point did recaptia ask me to prove that I am not a robot... Even now, you don't know.....I could be a robot....beep.

If any admins can help me recover my other account, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Beep.

Lol, there have been numerous moans about this set up but perhaps none as ... as vociferous as yours

Unfortunately I cannot help you with regain control over you old account, need a different admin for that. All I can suggest is that you look into keepass to help you keep tab with all your different logins...

Oh, and hope your issue gets sorted!

There is a big fat "Contact Forum Staff" button at the top right of the forum, how about clicking there and explain what your problem is?

Please send a PM to the administrators with details of your problem: you'd get a faster response than posting here.

Should there be any admin time available for adding mods, this one allows email login:
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=636415

Although I must admit the "phpBB © 2007" at the bottom looks worrying as it seems to indicate a super-old phpBB version.

Unfortunately it isn't as simple as a modification as that - our system uses KDE Identity for authentication, so you would need to do an email search there instead. This is something which is technically possible, but i'm unsure if such a change would have other impacts on how the login process works within the forum codebase.