MSISDN registration should warn/error for unsupported countries

[ara4n]

I just had a minor disaster in an important demo where the folks trying Riot all tried to sign-up with phone numbers in Hong Kong. Unsurprisingly, the 2FA SMS didn't work. We shouldn't just silently fail :(

[lampholder]

:(

Amandine has already raised this. I think making it work is actually an easy fix, esp. outside of the US/Canada (probably easier than modifying the clients with caveat text) - we just need to set the originator.

[lampholder]

@dbkr hardcoded the originator, which should make this work properly for global SMS with the exception of the US and Canada. US and Canada are currently expected in ~a week.

[lampholder]

If we are releasing /develop before US/Canada goes live we should put a warning on the sign up and settings pages. I don't know what we should do about the mobile apps - a multi-day lead time on releasing to the various app stores makes managing this a challenge.

IIRC the apps downgrade gracefully if the server doesn't support msisdn sign up - @ara4n might we consider disabling it in the matrix.org server until we've verified SMS sending is working globally (hopefully a week away)?

[ara4n]

i wouldn't object too much to hiding it until the OM side is sorted properly.

[lampholder]

I've changed my mind about hiding it.

My reasoning - even once US/Canada is provisioned, there are numerous international SMS delivery caveats that we might fall foul of in the early months (and, indeed, ongoing). E.g. Romania, I learned today, doesn't support UK VMN as originator, so our global fix of hardcoding the originator doesn't work there :(

I think we want to be live with this feature before we can have tested delivery globally, so I think modifying the interface to include the caveat and a link to status is the way to go.

[lampholder]

I've changed my mind again :) Because we can't get a warning notice in front of iPhone/Android users until a release is pushed out, I think we should disable this in Synapse to stop new people from seeing the (possibly doomed to failure) option to register with their msisdn.

[dbkr]

Blocked on matrix-org/synapse#2147

[dbkr]

Synapse PR now merged, we should probably wait for deploy / release

[ara4n]

bleurgh:

Shaltay joined
Hi
How can I add my phome number from Russia? I did it before without any problems, now it says "not supported

[lampholder]

We commented our Russia, so it now will try and send SMS there.

[ara4n]

this all happened; and russia got special cased.