Your account

Two-factor sign-in, time zone and your name for mentions — the settings that belong to you and apply in every community.

Some settings belong to the community, others belong to you. The ones on this page are yours: you set them once and they apply everywhere you are signed in with the same account.

You find them in the dashboard of any community under Settings — and just the same in your account area at account.pukalani.app under Profile. It is one and the same setting, whichever way you reach it.

Under Settings → Security sits the Two-factor card: a six-digit code from an authenticator app on your phone, on top of your password. Someone who knows your password still does not get in.

Setting it up

Scan the QR code

After clicking Set up, a QR code appears. Scan it with your authenticator app. No scanner at hand? The same secret is printed below for typing in manually.

Confirm the code

Enter the code your app shows. Only that proves the app is really set up.

Write down the recovery codes

Pukalani then shows a list of recovery codes. They are shown this one time only. Write them down somewhere safe — they are your way back in if you lose your phone. Each code works exactly once.

From then on, signing in asks for your password and a code. A recovery code always works in place of the code from the app.

What to know about it

When you sign in with Google, Google verifies your factors and your Pukalani code is not requested. The second factor applies to password sign-in. If you use Google to sign in, the security of your access depends on your Google account settings — set the second factor up there in that case.

Turning it off asks for a valid second factor, not for your password: a code from the app or a recovery code. Whoever removes the second factor should show that they still have it. That a recovery code counts here is deliberate — otherwise a lost phone would be a dead end.

Time zone

Under Settings → General, the Time zone card sets the time zone used to display dates and times.

The default is Automatic (browser) — the time zone of your device applies, exactly as before.
Otherwise you search for your zone in the field and pin it. Right below the field the effect is spelled out: Now: 04:24 in Europe/Berlin. A setting whose consequence you would only notice tomorrow should be checkable today.

Two places where deliberately nothing changes:

Relative times such as "5 minutes ago" stay as they are — a difference has no time zone.
Plain dates without a time mean the same day wherever you are.

The daily limit on upvotes does not follow your time zone. It counts one fixed calendar day for everybody — otherwise switching zones would hand out a second allowance the same evening. More on that under Discussions.

Your name for mentions

Also under Settings → General: the short name others use to mention you in posts and comments — @yourname.

It belongs to your account, not to a single community: the same person is called the same everywhere, and two accounts cannot hold the same name at the same time. Whoever claimed it first keeps it.
You do not have to fill anything in. Pukalani suggests a name based on your display name; you are mentionable from day one.
Allowed are lowercase letters, digits and underscores, 3 to 24 characters — an underscore may not sit at the start or the end. Some names are reserved (pukalani, team, admin among them).
You can change it every 30 days. The card tells you when the next change is possible.
Old mentions stay intact. If you rename yourself, the old name stays reserved for you and keeps pointing at you in posts already written.

How mentioning itself works is described under Discussions.

Community settings

Time zone, navigation, search listing, redirects and export — the tabs under Dashboard → Community that control how your community appears.