Jetpack Connect: Confusing Social Login flow when user doesn't have a WPCOM account yet.

[ivan-ottinger]

Impacted plugin

Jetpack

Quick summary

The current Jetpack Connect flow links to the following Login page:

When connecting a self-hosted Jetpack site to WordPress.com account that doesn't exist yet using "Continue with..." buttons, the flow gets confusing.

This seems to be a long-standing issue.

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• Issue was discovered: p1710857884265789/1710854911.107219-slack-C02TCEHP3HA
• Related discussion: p7DVsv-kfF-p2#comment-49614

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a test self-hosted Jetpack site.
2. Open a new / incognito browser window and make sure you are not logged in to any WordPress.com account there.
3. Log in to your new test site's WP Admin.
4. Navigate to the Jetpack settings page and click on the "Finish setting up Jetpack" button (and then "Connect your user account") to connect your test site with WordPress.com account.
5. Click on one of the "Continue with..." buttons and make sure to use an (Google / Apple / GitHub) account that hasn't been linked with any WordPress.com account yet.
6. Follow the steps and observe the flow.

A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

If the Google / Apple / GitHub account hasn't been linked with any WordPress.com account before, the flow should probably let the user create new WordPress.com account first and then link it with their Jetpack site automatically (as soon as the WordPress.com account is created).

What actually happened

The system tries to log in the user, but since their WordPress.com account doesn't exist, the flow has different outcome depending on the service used.

For instance, if we try to log in with Google, the following message gets displayed and the user might get stuck there, not knowing what to do next:

If we log in with GitHub, we get the following message:

This message at least informs the user what is going on and provides the next step, but when they create their WordPress.com account, the original flow of connecting the Jetpack site is exited and the user ends up with WordPress.com account, but without their Jetpack site connected.

I haven't tested the flow with Apple account, but I expect similar behavior.

Impact

All

Available workarounds?

Yes, easy to implement

Platform (Simple and/or Atomic)

Self-hosted

Logs or notes

No response

[jeherve]

Moving this to the Calypso repo, where the flow lives.

[github-actions[bot]]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• [ ] p7DVsv-kfF-p2#comment-49614

[simison]

@oskosk @jeherve which team on Jetpack could look into this?

[jeherve]

@rcanepa Do you have any insights on this, since you had worked on #50203 back in the day?

[rcanepa]

I read a few posts around the time we shipped a login experience based on magic links, and I couldn't find anything useful. The closest thing I found is that social links should create a WordPress.com account if there is none associated with the social one selected, which, I understand, is not even happening.

I failed to find supporting evidence for what I'm about to say, but, around that time, I believe that we decided to hide social links from the Jetpack Connection flow.

[ivan-ottinger]

I failed to find supporting evidence for what I'm about to say, but, around that time, I believe that we decided to hide social links from the Jetpack Connection flow.

If there's no bandwidth to review and fix each social signup flow separately at the moment, I think this is a good way to go - as even the users that already have one of their social accounts linked can still log in using their email address; and we won't be losing new users.