How to create an account without Telephone number if an non-activated account has already been created with the same E-Mail-Address that demands a phone number?

I’ve recently asked a friend (not a developer or otherweise IT-affiliated) to help me with a private project of mine.

For that, it would be very helpful for her to have a gitlab account, so she can make pull requests to my repo. Mind here, this is already a hurdle, since she has never used git before.

So she went to https://gitlab.com and was redirected to https://about.gitlab.com. There she saw the options “Get free trial” and “Sign in”. She obviously did not chose “Sign in” since she did not have an account yet. However “Get free trial” made her wary: I told her she could use it for free (if anything, I would pay for gitlab services. “Get free trial” implies that she would have to pay later.

So she looked around and found the “Pricing” link and clicked on it. There she found out that there was a free option and clicked on “Get Started” (and landed here.

She is rather sensitive about giving out private information such as her phone number. After the initial account creation, the account creation confirmation step was presented. She needed to enter a code from an E-Mail that was sent to here (no problem) but was also asked for here phone number, which she definitely did not want to disclose.

She came to me for help. I was confused: I don’t remember having to provide a phone number when I registered a few years ago. So I looked around and found yet another account creation link: on the “Sign-In” page, there is a “register now” link (leading here. When I tried to create a dummy account with that link, it did not ask me for a phone number.

So I told her. She war already very annoyed by the site’s behaviour but tried to register with that link anyways. Only she couldn’t, because she already tried to register with the other link, and she cannot delete that other account because its has not been activated yet, so she has to wait three days until that account gets deleted so she can try to create a new one.

Now here are my questions:

1. is there a way to delete that account earlier, so she can start contributing to my project?
2. Is it possible to clear up this account creation process? My friend is basically fuming right now, and I have a very hard time to convince her to help me after all. And I can understand her. The user flow here is a typical dark pattern, trying to send her to the “free trial”-account creation route that also demands to know here telephone number, where the basic and simple account creation page is on the last place where she would look (because she would not click on “Sign in” before she has an account).

A free trial doesn’t imply anything. You have the choice to test the paid functionality and if you don’t want it, the trial stops and it continues as free.

As for the account, the majority of us here are community users of Gitlab who have no permissions whatsoever to assist with accounts, passwords, 2FA, etc.

So to address issue 1, you have two choices. First is you can open a support ticket here with the Gitlab team (of which I’ve already selected for you user accounts option) https://support.gitlab.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000803379

The support ticket may or may not be addressed quickly since the majority of tickets are for paid users only. So you may have to wait a couple of days, which would be the same as waiting 3 days for it to self-delete anyway. If she wants to start contributing earlier than this, choose a different username/email address combo. Otherwise it’s just wait or open a ticket which may be slightly quicker.

The other alternative is continue the registration that she has already started and provide the phone number. Gitlab is a trusted and responsible company so there is nothing sinister about giving a number. If you don’t want to do that, wait 3 days.

Thanks for your reply. Looks like we will just have to wait until the unconfirmed account expires.

The other alternative is continue the registration that she has already started and provide the phone number. Gitlab is a trusted and responsible company so there is nothing sinister about giving a number. If you don’t want to do that, wait 3 days.

I know that, but my friend does not. And honestly, I’m not going to push her to give her phone number to a company that she barely even knows, that would set a bad precedent. In the end, the best way to protect your data is data minimization.

there are issues with the phone number… at least three cases yesterday and the day before never received the sms