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Comment on Ask HN: How many times do users mistype their password on a registration form?

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I can't tell you about the password, but we had a registration form which asked for the e-mail address. You could actually read the e-mail address (like normal) so people could easily see and correct their typos had they bothered.

The thing is, they didn't. The e-mail address is used for activation and we had huge numbers of unactivated accounts. I don't have the exact numbers any more, so this is from memory: when we added another e-mail field and checked if they were the same, the number of unactivated accounts halved.

Currently, the number of unactivated accounts is consistently between 10% and 20%, so that should give you an indication on how much it saved us.

I can only assume that for passwords the problem of typos is worse, since you can't proofread.

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