Frequently Asked Questions

We provide a web form that can help you recover your login and password, provided your member contact email address works and you know what it is. This form, is, however, time sensitive. It can only be used once per week in order to prevent attempts to "grief" members by constantly resetting their information. If you need a password reset and it's been less than one week since you created your membership or previously used the reset facility, please send email to support@nearlyfreespeech.net from your member contact email address and we'll be happy to check things out and reset your password.

If you lose your login, member password, and access to your email address all at the same time, you're in a bad place. Obviously you should never let that happen. However, we recognize that, for various reasons, it sometimes does, and we have established standard practices for recovering access to a membership when it does.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of "I lost all my information, please make an exception to your security practices and let me in" requests we receive come from people trying to gain illicit access to someone else's membership, and because NearlyFreeSpeech.NET takes the security and privacy of our members' services very seriously, the burden of proof that legitimate membership holders who have lost their information will have to meet to differentiate themselves from these would-be scammers is be extremely high.

Our standard practices for membership recovery verification vary somewhat depending on the circumstances, but typically involve three parts: a best-effort attempt to verify the identity of the requester using standard identity documents, an attempt to verify the request using the contact information we already have, and supplemental questions about the membership requiring information that only the member should have. The process will be time-consuming and slow; it can frequently take a week or more. To initiate it, contact us by email.

We believe all of our members know that we are serious about protecting their privacy and security; we believe that's at least part of the reason a lot of them pick us. We believe that they expect us to live up to that in situations such as these so that when they emerge from it, they can be supremely confident that their membership can't be hijacked by the first person who comes along with a good story. Consequently, we automatically construe any attempt to convince us to make an exception to our standard practices as an attempt by an unauthorized party to social engineer illicit access. This includes threats, sob stories, and everything in between.