
Tell HN: Locked out of Gitlab and lost years of work - vorpalhex
I&#x27;ve been a user of Gitlab since 2018 and fell in love with their integrated CI tooling instantly. As a company I appreciated their openness and remote oriented culture. I&#x27;ve recommended them heavily to friends.<p>Which leaves me in an awkward spot as I&#x27;ve now been locked out of my account for over 5 days due to a security snafu (tied to https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.gitlab.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;account-has-been-blocked&#x2F;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&#x27;s easy to miss one. Which had led to my account getting locked.<p>Which would be fine except that the email confirmation system is broken.<p>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&#x27;t log in and get the error &quot;This email must be confirmed before you can login.&quot;. Attempts to resend a confirmation email are no longer possible - I get asked to log in.<p>Support has not been helpful. It&#x27;s been days of back and forth and despite me linking the issue, sharing screenshots and so on, all I&#x27;ve gotten is &quot;have you tried incognito mode?&quot;.<p>I am pulling my hair out. I don&#x27;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&#x27;ve had to shift somewhere else but that&#x27;s not an ideal solution.<p>What else should I be doing? What else can I do?
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lindsayolson
Hey there - it's Lindsay from GitLab again. You and I connected on Twitter
about this very thing.

I 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

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vorpalhex
Thank you for reaching out. It looks like the latest verification email
finally.. well did it's thing.

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db48x
There may not be much you can do other than setting up back-up hosting just in
case you ever lose your current hosting. It can be just a plain git mirror
that is mentioned in your readme, so that if your users notice the repository
at the primary host going stale they'll know where to check for future
updates.

