Weird behaviour of the Discourse/Peertube login method

[xose]

Hello, everyone.

For the past day, I have been observing this anomalous behavior in the Peertube instance:

While logged into scanlines.xyz, when I try to log in to videos.scanlines.xyz using my Discourse account, a new Peertube account is automatically generated. In my case, I have tried to log in three times, and three accounts have been automatically generated:
@xose-1
@xose-2
@xose-3

I have tested this with Brave browser and Google Chrome with the same results: I cannot access Peertube with my Discourse account and a new one is created everytime i try to log in.

So after looking on the net and the peertube related posts here I’ve decided to ask: is anyone else observing this behaviour?

Thanks in advance!

x

[palomakop]

hi @xose, thanks for letting us know about this. i just tried to log in as well and it made a new account palomakop-1 instead of letting me access my actual account.

@cyberboy666 - would you be able to check this out? seems like something might have changed in the auth process for peertube?

hope we can figure it out soon! again thanks for your detailed note

[palomakop]

hi @xose, i’m still trying to figure out what’s going on. just out of curiosity – have you changed your email address for your account on this forum recently?

[xose]

Yep! That’s correct! The last email on the previous account is from 26/11/2025. Do you want me to try changing it back? I can do it tomorrow. Thanks for the time!

[palomakop]

wow, what a coincidence, i just changed my email too! so i guess it’s not a widespread thing. no need to change your email back yet. we are working on it and apparently it’s a thing that has happened before and then i forgot… sorry for the delay but if you can wait we’ll get it sorted.

feel free to shoot me an email at paloma@palomakop.tv and ill help you sort it out when we get the fix.

[cyberboy666]

this is a known issue when your scanlines forum email changes/does not match the email used when the peertube account was created - in the past i have been fixing this manually on request - happy to do it for you both too.

heres the info on how to resolve it from a previous post:

Issues with changing email/username used on scanlines

a couple of people ( @pixelflowers @hypermosh ) have had issues (mostly on videos.scanlines.xyz) when they change the email or username used on the main scanlines forum this is due to the way single sign on works and the lack of flexibility to change user info on peertube (which i think is due to potential account hijacking if username changes on activtypub namespaces) i think it is possible to resolve these problems by making some changes in the database - although havnt got around to looking…

how to change email for user on peertube

• first ssh into the peertube machine (need to know ip and password for this - ssh root@<ip-address>)
• enter postgres sudo -u postgres psql
• connected to db: \l to list dbs, \c peertube_prod to connect
• \d to see tables , \d user to see columns for the user table
• UPDATE "user" SET email = '<new email>' WHERE "username" = '<user>';

NOTE:

if a duplicate peertube account was created when attempting to login from scanlines (ie cyberboy666-1 you may need to delete this account within the peertube admin ui first so that the email is avaliable to be changed to for main account)

[cyberboy666]

@palomakop @xose i just updated the peertubes email accounts to match your current scanlines email accounts. let me know if its working for you now or you want to set it to something else

[xose]

Uooops! Sorry I dindn’t see the post. Everything is working properly now. Thanks a lot @cyberboy666 and @palomakop

[palomakop]

for posterity: it looks like as an admin you can also change other users’ email addresses in the peertube web UI. i assume it would do the same as the method above (but so far untested). also, we now have a service account that can log into peertube directly (to protect against admins getting locked out of the discourse auth, though that should be rare )