Why does GitLab require a phone number or credit card just to create a free account?
Hosting a few bytes of source code should not require a phone number.
This makes it look like GitLab is going downhill and becoming unable to compete with GitHub or even Dropbox for hosting.
On top of that, there are so many bugs with the new system that GitLab added, even from a quick look on this forum.
GitLab, why?
Why are you comparing Gitlab to Dropbox? Gitlab is not a file storage system like Dropbox, Onedrive, Mega, Google Drive or whatever, and shouldn’t even be used like that. If that is what your intentions are, maybe it is good that you couldn’t register and abuse the system.
Gitlab requires a phone number as it is mandatory for 2FA. So if you didn’t chose to use an authenticator app or hardware token like Yubikey, then it is going to ask you to provide your number for sms 2FA.
No, it asks for a phone number even before we had the chance to create 2FA. Also, the code was never sent on my phone, I had to use the credit card to validate.
What country? I know Github has a list of countries supported for sms which doesn’t include certain countries due to reliability issues of not being able to deliver sms. Could be similar situation with Gitlab.
France. It’s in the list of the countries.
TBH I think the only thing to look at this would either be opening a ticket here: https://support.gitlab.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000803379 (assuming of course it doesn’t get bounced for being a free account which is frustrating).
Either that, or opening an issue here: Issues · GitLab.org / GitLab · GitLab
There’s already loads of posts on this forum with people having problems with sms or credit card, so I’m surprised that it’s really not being addressed.
I’ll also flag this topic to the forum mods as maybe they can also find a way of resolving these issues finally.