Frequently Asked Questions

The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET FAQ (*)

Login (*)

Q. What is the login recovery process?

Our login recovery process applies in very specific, rare situations:

To recover access to a membership in these situations, we offer a variety of possible recovery actions, and a certain number of them must be completed successfully. The login recovery process is very onerous (by Internet standards, anyway; it's not really that difficult) and since its goal is to prevent illicit membership access, you will probably find that we are not very helpful while you are completing it.

These recovery actions can be performed by any member at any time:

These optional actions must be set up in advance from the profile tab in our member interface in order to be used for recovery:

The default number of actions required to recover a membership is three, but this can be customized from the profile tab in our member interface to make recovery (and consequently hijacking) more or less onerous.

If (and only if) you choose to provide both a photo ID and an account statement, then at least one must display the same official mailing address as that shown on the corresponding account. If neither does, you must additionally provide address verification, typically a utility bill, lease, or property tax bill matching both the address and the surname or company name on the account (either currently or contemporary with the deposit). If you are providing either photo ID or an account statement, but not both, then you can skip this requirement.

The third and worst case scenario is that you have two-factor authentication configured that isn't working and you didn’t save any one-use recovery codes and you don't know your login and password and your member contact email address isn't working. This case is so spectacularly unlikely that even if your recovery settings are lower, you will have to complete all possible verification steps to regain access to your membership. Seriously, don't let this happen.

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. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET takes the security and privacy of our members' services very seriously. We believe 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 socially-engineer illicit access. This includes threats, attempts at negotiation, sob stories, and everything in between.