Why ask for a birthdate at signup?

I saw the signup form asks for a birthdate and informs:

Note: this will be used for verification and cannot be changed in the future.

I think we should only ask for verifiable information when users actually want to verify their profile. This seems an unnecessary hurdle right at signup when a lot of folks might just want to have a look at the app, before deciding if they want to engage more.

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Good point. Maybe we’ll just ask for birthdate and name at the start, then when users go to verify for the first time they can edit that info so it matches their documents.

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The same I think about the location. Why is it needed if I only want to join a guided city tour some other coucher gives?

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I think the only time you’ll be required to give an accurate location is to verify your address

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I believe in some countries we are legally obligated to verify that a user is at least 13 years old, and in order for them to agree to the terms of service they would need to be 18 or have a cosigner to help them enter the ToS agreement, right? I haven’t looked at the laws, but maybe we don’t need an exact age but rather just a confirmation that the user is at least of the legally required age.

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Just a little comment about entering birthday, I might suggest an input template of YYYY/MM/DD or something, as requiring a calendar feature going back 30 years is tedious. :slight_smile:

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Totally agree. Design team should be able to make this happen.

At this point becomes pertinent to talk also about localization: users should be given the possibility to choose in what format they prefer to see time and dates; in this case some may prefer YYYY/MM/DD while others may prefer DD/MM/YYYY.

For an international internal app at HSBC I advised the format like ‘23 aug 2023’ and everybody was happy. Later we can depend the format on preferred setting and detected(browser) setting using the Intl library.

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This type of format that has the first three letters of the month in it is clear, and probably is the easiest option that should be used in order to avoid confusion, I like it. Good job suggesting this! :wink:

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