I agree, it's more vulnerable to other things not working, @davidl1, even if it's just that emails can be slow to come in sometimes rather than a service being down altogether - it can take several attempts if email is playing up. We are rather trapped by having to use the My Account email address as the ID.
I don't think some people realised what they were asking for when they used to complain about the forum requiring separate sign in details. Most of the time we are not necessarily needing to involve My Account, unless it's specifically a billing issue, so a very few people were really inconvenienced by having to add their details (just once) in the forum.
And most staff still seem to require people to do this. They don't seem to easily access the My Account information from here unless it's been added to the community profile separately.
It coincides however with Talktalk creating the sign in with pin number option for My Account. However, My Account doesn't seem to preclude the choice of simply using a password and user name for that, so perhaps the same could have been done on the forum, @StephenF?
StephenF has mentioned also setting it up eventually to make it possible to receive the pin number by text - but that is also vulnerable to loss of signal on mobiles, network outages and sometimes having to switch the mobile off and back on again in the hope of reconnecting to the network - after all of which the original 10 minute window of opportunity may have vanished!
Somehow I don't think that Talktalk is going to roll this back altogether, but, as you say, @davidl1, it would be good to have the reliable option of the old sign in method, which was so much quicker to use on a daily basis. If one was using the remembered password option on a device it took a split second to get in. This is cumbersome and slow by comparison.
I believe we can also reach the forum via My Account now, so that is a fallback solution, @davidl1.
Gliwmaeden2, a fellow customer.
