On 20/02/15 17:28, Brion Vibber wrote:
IMO we should strongly discourage use of multiple accounts with the same email to the point of forbidding it in software for new accounts.[1]
Figuring out how to migrate those old accounts is something that needs to be considered and worked out, but it shouldn't hold up work on making the login/reset form accept email addresses for the common case.
[1] I personally have a bunch of test accounts that probably have the same email, and I'm sure some folks have bots and other things set up similarly. Note that many email providers including Gmail allow email aliases with "+" and something else after your mailbox name, such as 'johndoe+testing99 at wikimedia.org'; I've used this in the past to have separate accounts on one email for Apple and other providers as well.
-- brion
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry#Legitimate_uses for a non-comprehensive list of use cases for alternate accounts. Requiring separate emails, or expecting users to know that particular trick, would be problematic for many of these, and may even encourage some users to not use an email address at all.
-I