Ops person: “Hey! Can you come fix this? I‘m trying to add a user and it keeps giving me an error saying that the phone number must be unique. What’s the ETA on a fix?”

Me: 😓

How awful can the brain of such person be, to be able to read the full sentence word for word, yet still fail to grasp what the issue is?

@Jilano depends.

Was the unique phone number a real requirement or a mistake?

We had a similar problem recently where email ended up being a required field for every one.

But it should only have been required for a certain operation.

So a requirement for unique phone looks like something of an accident.

Even if most have their own phone today, just 25 years ago that was not very common.

Even in businesses some users working un a workshop often shared a phone.

But thats the usual problem with error reports, lack of context.

:)

Ws phone number supposed to be a unique value?

Unique phone doesnt allow a person to have multiple accounts (unless he makes up phone numbers, but then he could block legit people with them).

@Quirinus if it is combined with a validation sms it should be quite reliable to prevent to many accounts while still preventing abuse blocking some one else.

I would still not use an unique field but rather only allow the combination of phone+validated:true once and if you validate a new account, invalidate the old.

Could be a legit design issue because phone numbers can be "recycled" over time. So it may happen that a user tries to register and can't because his phone number had been with someone else before who had also been registering.

Requiring unique phone number may prevent a user from using more than one device so it definitely can be either a bug or a stupid feature.

@Voxera Yeah, they’re both required and unique.

@Fast-Nop Valid

"Also, what does ... 'you-ni-queue' mean? Is that a brand?"

🙄

"i don't know, how long will it take you to type a phone number that doesn't already belong to some user in our db?"