TL;DR – The default answer to security question “In what city were you born?” is San Francisco

Here’s the scenario: You signed up for a new free Salesforce Developer account. After filling the form properly you get the screen that they have sent a verification email and, lo and behold, it is immediately in your inbox. You click the link and get…a DNS error. Well, that is annoying, but understandable given the volume of traffic Salesforce deals with. It will propagate eventually, so you decide to come back later.

Later, you come back and the DNS now resolves to your shiny new org, but now the new user token has expired and instead of the prompt to change your password you just get the regular old login screen asking for a username that is in the email and a password that has never been created. This is a Charlie Brown and Lucy place-kicking moment.

Well, this has happened to me a few times, and in the past I just created a new account and eventually would get a notification that the previous org was being decommissioned for non-use. But today I didn’t feel like filling the form out again, so I tried something unique (for me)…when prompted for city on the password reset screen I first tried blank, since that is what it would be if it was never set. That resulted in a note that I was wrong (not the ISO-270001 recommendation, BTW). So I thought “what would have I set as a default response?” And then I thought “the city where headquarters is”. And I was right.

Cheers!

© Scott S. Nelson