Requiring an Email Address

We’re making a change today that will affect new writers looking to join Write.as. Due to a couple issues we’ve encountered recently, we’ll now require an email address to create a new Write.as account.

While our high privacy standards remain unchanged, this new requirement will help us reduce abuse and provide a better experience for our writers and customers. Read on for more.

Your Privacy

First, we’ve always prided ourselves on the privacy we offer our users — from minimizing data collection to resisting unfounded user data requests from entities both public and private. With this new email requirement, none of that changes.

As you can see in our Privacy Policy, we still maintain our stringent data practices, never sharing your personal information with third parties for marketing or other reasons, and encrypting data like email addresses in transit and at rest.

Though we recommend all Write.as users add an email address to their account, this new requirement only affects people who haven’t signed up yet. Going forward, an email address is no longer optional — everyone will need to supply that and verify that they own it in order to start a Write.as blog.

Why Make This Change

There are two main motivations for this change: a botnet attack we endured last month, and the customer service workload we’ve seen increase over the years.

Over the course of July, we encountered a distributed attack on our service from bots creating Write.as accounts only to test out stolen credit card numbers. Thankfully, with our payment processor Stripe behind the scenes, we were able to prevent and block most fraudulent charges — but many still got through.

We’ve since refunded these fraudulent charges to their rightful owners, blocked the attacks, and put systems in place to prevent this in the future. Going forward, we remain vigilant for attacks like this, and will continue refining the automated protections we have in place.

In the coming weeks, new customers will see additional data requirements around payments — standard billing information you’d supply anywhere on the web — designed to further prevent these fraudulent attempts. This is critically needed, as this activity cost us time and extra revenue losses from both refunds and chargebacks (where we incur a much larger fee).

Customer Service

Otherwise, we’ve seen our customer service workload increase over the years due to accounts without an email address on them. While we’ve always encouraged users not to share this information with us if they don’t want to, we’ve now seen more issues than not from it.

Without an email address on your account, we’re unable to send payment receipts, upcoming renewal reminders, or password-reset emails. And if you ever lose access to your account due to a forgotten password (hey, it happens!), a human on the team has to do an extra level of sleuthing, while maintaining our security standards, just to restore your access to your work.

At this point, we’ve decided it’s more important that writers have their email address on their Write.as account than the minor privacy enhancement they might get from withholding it. While still not required, we strongly suggest that any current Write.as users add an email address to their account today, if they haven’t already.

We hope everyone will find this minor change reasonable, and as always, we thank you for continuing to trust us with your writing!

If you have any questions or concerns, we hope you’ll give your feedback on Remark.as (Discuss...) or by replying in the fediverse @write_as@writing.exchange.

#changes #email