Tell HN: Locked out of Gitlab and lost years of work
Which leaves me in an awkward spot as I've now been locked out of my account for over 5 days due to a security snafu (tied to https://forum.gitlab.com/t/account-has-been-blocked/39995 ). Gitlab wanted me to reconfirm my email, which is fine. Unfortunately they asked me to do this via a single email, and as any user of Gitlab knows, I get a mess of email from them on the regular (CI notifications) and it's easy to miss one. Which had led to my account getting locked.
Which would be fine except that the email confirmation system is broken.
I was able to request a confirmation email, and confirmed my email. I even have a screenshot saying my email has been confirmed (...again). Yet I can't log in and get the error "This email must be confirmed before you can login.". Attempts to resend a confirmation email are no longer possible - I get asked to log in.
Support has not been helpful. It's been days of back and forth and despite me linking the issue, sharing screenshots and so on, all I've gotten is "have you tried incognito mode?".
I am pulling my hair out. I don't know what else to do at this point except restore my backups to a gitea instance and move webhosts. All of my open source work on Gitlab will end up becoming zombie projects - I can try to let users know I've had to shift somewhere else but that's not an ideal solution.
What else should I be doing? What else can I do?
3 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 20.1 ms ] threadI wanted to respond because I feel just terrible that you have had such a frustrating experience. :(
You are not wrong when you use words like "snafu" and "broken". If it's any consolation, you are not alone. Unfortunately, GitLab's messaging about this inconvenience got lost for more users than we anticipated. You are a victim of that and I want to let you know: we learned A LOT from this experience over on our side.
Ok, so what do we do about your account? If I am understanding correctly, your secondary email was verified, but your primary email is still NOT verified.
I can confirm that Support just now sent you another verification email that is unlikely to get lost in the mix this time. Please look out for it in your inbox in order to rectify this ASAP.
Again, I hope hope hope that we can regain some of the trust that was lost during this negative experience. Please keep me posted on when you get access again! Twitter: @communitylinds