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It seems that we're seeing a rash of questions from people whose email accounts have been compromised (or to which they've otherwise lost access). More common is the non-answer Answer of "me too!" (And, I guess, not just email. Facebook is a major one, too.)

Most of these questions seem to be based on the incorrect assumption that we can actually do something about someone's account. All we can really do is point them to the official support information and wish them luck.

Would it be worthwhile to create some Community Wiki canonical questions for these? Then, at least, we could close these other questions as duplicates.

I'd be willing to take a run at such a question/answer for Gmail/Google, but I don't use the other services enough to them.

Or would this just be redundant to the help/support sites already set up by these various services?

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  • Also: One question per service, or a generic one? I guess one per service would be more helpful.
    – nic
    Feb 11, 2013 at 15:36
  • @NicolasRaoul One per service will do. Just giving "Follow instructions in this link" for each service should do the trick. It's my first visit to WebApp and I'm really shocked to find it's almost flooded with YahooAnswer like questioner. Since StackExchange engine should detect and offer the canonical answer to each service everytime anyone write "halp my{service} haxed", hopefully it would cut most of those questions.
    – Martheen
    Feb 20, 2013 at 8:46

2 Answers 2

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Would it be worthwhile to create some Community Wiki canonical questions for these? Then, at least, we could close these other questions as duplicates.

Yes, I think it's a good idea to have a canonical question on account recovery.

Or would this just be redundant to the help/support sites already set up by these various services?

Sometimes, these are often buried deep within the help pages - given Stack Exchange site rank pretty high on search engines, I think it's worth while having a canonical password/account recovery question, with a reference to the official documentation as well.

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  • "Stack Exchange site rank pretty high on search engines" On one side, yay, on the other side, huh, so that's how those questioner comes here. I'm used to visit Stackoverflow and Superuser, and while Superuser got its share of "my pc broken halp" WebApps seems to have it even worse. Anything to cut down on such questions will do great to this site readability.
    – Martheen
    Feb 20, 2013 at 8:49
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Later, I have posted a similar question (at least concerning Google accounts), and started work on a Q&A for this.

See Do we need a canonical “I have forgotten my Google username and/or Password” answer?

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