To be fair, your bank likely has a bit more money to throw at this problem.

I would think in this case the entire point is not so much to help them secure stuff, but an attempt to remove them as a target for hacking in the first place.

> but an attempt to remove them as a target for hacking in the first place.

This is very short sighted. As long as you have a popular site you're a target for defacement. And the convenience expense is enormous. As others have mentioned oauth or a twitter or facebook login alternative would have been a sane choice, what they've decided wasn't sane, it's embarrassing for them and frustrating for users who trusted the site.

Inconveniencing users to this degree is probably causing the hackers to laugh, this is in effect a huge win for them they can go brag about now in addition to accessing sensitive information.

I think you are at least slightly overstating how inconvenient this is. I mean, yes, I could wish it was easier. No, this isn't going to stop me from getting back on the site.

And how many answers did you lose? Because I lost a bunch. I'm not overstating anything, I'm honestly frustrated and dispirited because of a high degree of incompetence and bad judgment.

So, you

1) had solved a bunch of Project Euler problems, but fewer than 200 (account recovery is still available for those folks), 2) lost/forgot your signon information, and 3) lost/deleted all the code you used to find the answers?

You, sir, are in a very small boat. A frustrating boat, to be sure, but I suspect that virtually none of their users share your fate.

I'm in pretty much the same boat. The actual problems I don't really mind (I have to code to some, and it wouldn't hurt to revisit the rest), but I'd very much like to have my username back.

OK, so it's an extremely minor issue, but given that the reason for it is so silly, it's still kinda irritating.

You mean you didn't save all your results? Don't a lot of the problems build on previous results? Why would one lose anything? FYI I was interested but did not start down the projecteuler rabbit hole myself, so perhaps I'm missing something.

See a reply to a sibling post of yours. You're at least losing your handle/username for good.

(I did, cannot recall that password so far and it's not in lastpass for some reason - maybe too long ago/before I got into that habit)

I only have about 50 anyway. So, not that big of a deal just to redo.

> To be fair, your bank likely has a bit more money to throw at this problem.

I suppose they could charge 1 USD for (lifetime) membership and store the last four digits of your credit card in lieu of a username, so that they could easily look up the salt that gives the salt with witch they've hashed your email... ;-)

(Would require that you could supply the last digits of your possibly expired credit card, when you lost the password ten years hence ...)

The last four digits of your credit card should not be considered secure information. It's printed on all of your receipts. You carry it on your person in plain text. Many of your online accounts will display it in your account settings without an additional login. It's probably in both your mail and your email. Once someone has it, they can use it for years for recovery on any service that accepts it, and I know some will allow full account recovery using it alone.

True enough. On the other hand, all this is to avoid storing a username, which also isn't secure information.

A bank also has a lot more law enforcement to through at this problem.