optionally perform mail confirmation independent from monitoring

[wrosenauer]

In case a community wants to be a bit more strict and make sure that a node owner is reachable via mail (the mail address is valid) it should be possible to make the mail confirmation mandatory even before the vpn key is activated.

[baldo]

This change would take quite some effort and I'm not sure it's worth it to be honest:

On the one hand there are people not willing to give a valid email address. This won't change by forcing them to do so. I think they would use services like anonbox.net for one time mail addresses.

On the other hand such a change would complicate the setup of new nodes: Users might abort the process at different steps:

• Having to wait for an email to arrive (graylisting could increase time here).
• Not recieving the email at all (spam filters).
• Mail clients may fail to open the activation link correctly (problem with too long URLs or special characters).

Then there are a lot of questions coming to my head:

• Would people have to validate their email address for every new node? If not: We would need a concept of users.
• What is the state of a node when the email address is not yet validated? Does the user get a token?
• How can the user change a misspelled email address?
• What happens if a user changes his email address for a node after activation? Is the VPN key inactive for that time? Or does the node have two email adresses: An active one an a pending one?

As stated above I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Also I feel such a change could increase the number of support emails and decrease the number of new nodes being setup.

Is there a special reason for this request? Perhaps another approach could help.

[wrosenauer]

In our community we are facing the issue that many nodes are set up in kind of commercial use completely anonymously and w/o coordinates. We love the "frei" in freifunk but we want to have a way to be able to talk to our node owners.
The user / router management currently in netmon seems to be a useful feature but it misses the VPN key management. So netmon is optional currently and EOL anyway. So we are looking into a system which can replace it but keeping some features (notifications and geolocation placement) and also adding VPN key registration.
I understood that ffffng currently has not really a user management but only keeps data from a user in addition to the router data.

I share your thoughts in general but our issue currently is not the growth rate of our network but potential misuse.

If nothing like this is on your radar I agree that the effort is not worth it for you.

[baldo]

Are you coming to Berlin for the WCW? I'll be around probably so we could discuss possible solutions there.