elijahbrownsk-png

On recovery after a failed check, what has worked for me on endpoints that have to stay open before sign-in: - Escalate rather than block. If the invisible mode fails, show the checkbox on the same page and keep everything the visitor typed. Losing the form contents is what makes people give up. - Decide per endpoint what a failure costs. For a contact form, accepting the message into a held queue that a person reviews, and that never triggers an outbound email, often beats a 403: a false positive then costs a short delay rather than a lost enquiry. - For a signup route you control, a soft failure can still create the account but keep it unconfirmed and limited until the email link is clicked, so the check decides how much friction comes next rather than whether the person gets in. - Offer a fallback that isn't the same form, such as a plain email address, and say so in the error message. - Log the rejection reason (expired, replayed, wrong hostname or action) separately. Expired tokens from a tab left open want a silent refresh, not a challenge, and you only see how many there are if they're counted apart. On the 503 when the checking service is down: for low-stakes endpoints I'd rather accept with a tight rate limit and mark the request as unchecked, and refuse only where an accepted request costs money, such as sending an SMS.

A few failures I've run into that might be worth checking for: - Email templates still using `{{ .ConfirmationURL }}` while the app uses the SSR/PKCE flow with a `/auth/confirm` route that expects `token_hash`. The confirmation link works in some setups and quietly fails in others. - No custom SMTP on a project that's about to go live. The built-in sender only delivers to your team's addresses and has a low hourly limit, so real users sign up, never get the email, and nothing errors on the client. - Auth hooks switched on in the dashboard (Before User Created, Custom Access Token) pointing at an endpoint that's down or slow. Every signup or token refresh fails and the error the user sees doesn't point at the hook. Just listing which hooks are enabled and where they point would save people time. - Confirmation and magic links opened by corporate mail scanners before the person clicks, which uses up the one-time token and shows up as "link expired". You can't detect that from config, but a WARN when templates link straight to the verify endpoint would point people at the cause.

Now that captcha is enforced on the token endpoint, any app build released before you added the token will fail sign-in, so a forced update or a minimum version check for older builds saves some support tickets. Worth testing the refresh token flow too, since that grant doesn't carry a captcha token and you want existing sessions to keep working.

Since you're asking newcomers to leave out employer, client and colleague details, a check on the question body before it posts would back that up: flag anything that looks like an email address, a phone number or a company domain, and ask the person to confirm or edit it. A soft prompt at that moment is easier to act on than a rule in the guidelines, and it catches the signature or contact line people paste in along with the problem. Letting someone draft the question before registering, and asking for the account at the point they post, would also lower the bar for the first one.

One case to design for as the model grows is the anonymous visitor who saved three IDs in the browser and then signs in with Google. Merging that local list into user_devices with an upsert that ignores conflicts on (user_id, hotkey) makes the merge safe to repeat, so signing in again or from a second tab doesn't throw duplicate-key errors at the user. Trimming the hotkey before insert is worth it too, since an ID pasted with a trailing space would otherwise get past the unique constraint as a different device.

Refusing to pass on an empty owner result is the right default, because a check that can't see Alice's row would otherwise look exactly like a secure table. When you move to writes, the case I'd add first is Bob inserting a row with Alice's user id in the owner column, since an insert policy with a loose WITH CHECK lets that through while every read test stays green. And yes, one private table is a sensible first try.