Breaking The Silence › Followers and Account migration

Followers

We introduced the concept of followers, which was often misinterpreted. You "follow" a person you like. We love our buddies system and won't change it, but on the other hand we also want to implement functionality that in our opinion can work great with a gaming community like Crossfire. For example many people want to know what mAus does on Crossfire. Any journal he creates is statistically a huge activity catalyst. Why not offer people an option to follow users such as mAus and get notified every time they create content? Of course you're completely free to ignore this feature, no harm done. Yet it would seem quite cool to find on your profile that 20 people are following you on Crossfire. You don't only gain pretty much assured activity on your content in terms of comments, but also nice bragging rights to the other users :)

Every user received a couple users he automatically follows. We picked those that you wanted to add as a buddy but never got accepted by the other party. This was solely done to give you a sense of the functionality and get the hang of it. Feel free to remove any person you are following right now by clicking on their names and pressing the "Stop following" button on their profile. You can add people you wish to follow in a similar way by going to their profile and clicking the "Follow" button.

Account migration

One of the major hick-ups during the release was most definitely the migration of old Crossfire 3 accounts to Crossfire 4. To understand the reason behind the migration mechanism one should first read about the new account strategy we wish to apply throughout Crossfire 4.

During our time with Crossfire 3 we encountered many account issues primarily due to the lack of any real security when it comes down to registering and using your account credentials. When registering on Crossfire 3 you needn't fill in a valid email address as it never got used anyway. We never sent out a real account activation mail, at least not one that you actually needed to activate your account with. And once you were logged in, you could change your email address without a problem. Of course this had major consequences. Losing track of your account because of a fake or old email address simply led you to create new accounts, and creating fake accounts was as easy as it gets. Because of the weak link between email address and Crossfire account, accounts were prone to hijacking through social engineering or tricking admins. With Crossfire 4 we made that link as strong as possible to make sure your account is always yours only. You not only have to log in with your email address, you also have to activate your account with it, accept any password change, and accept any email address change.

This approach can only work if all current accounts are linked tightly to their email addresses. This is how account migration works:

1. In case a user still has access to the email address linked to his account and remembers his password, he can login without a problem.
   
2. In case a user still has access to the email address linked to his account, but forgot his password, he can request a new password by filling in his valid email address in here: http://www.crossfire.nu/user/forgot-password
   
3. In case a user doesn't have access to the email address linked to his account, or forgot the email address linked to his account, but still remembers his username and password, he can fill in his username and password here: http://www.crossfire.nu/user/emailMigration
   
4. In case a user doesn't have access to the email address linked to his account, or forgot the email address linked to his account, and doesn't remember his user name or password, there's basically no way to automatically be sure it is actually his account. There are however other ways to provide proof of ownership but those have to be handled manually by a classified admin.