Over the last few weeks we have worked on the first piece of a larger project to overhaul MuckRock Accounts, our login and user management system, to create a better experience for new and existing users. MuckRock Accounts now supports two-factor authentication to help keep your account secure. We’ve improved our signup process to make it easier and smoother to sign up, find pending invites or discover organizations you’re eligible to join automatically. We’re rolling out a new feature that lets users join some organizations without an invitation if one of their verified email addresses matches a registered email domain.
Two-factor authentication
All users now have the ability to better secure their MuckRock accounts with two-factor authentication. We really can’t understate the importance of enabling two-factor authentication to protect your MuckRock account, especially but not exclusively for our users working on sensitive investigations. If you don’t have two-factor enabled on your account, you will be occasionally prompted to enable it upon login.
Before you can enroll in two-factor authentication, you will need to confirm any email addesses tied to your account. Once that’s complete. We’ll prompt you to enroll in two-factor authentication.
You’ll need a mobile phone with access to a two-factor authentication application like 1Password or Google Authenticator. Setting up two-factor authentication is easy and drastically lowers the chances of someone gaining unauthorized access to your MuckRock account. You may also consult our documentation at a later time if you need to manage backup codes or disable two-factor authentication at a later time for any reason.
Onboarding improvements
Confirm email addresses
MuckRock has always encouraged users to confirm your email addresses – but we’re making that more prominent and some of the new features that we’re rolling out, now and in the months to come, will require you to have confirmed your email addresses.
If you have one or more email addresses associated with your account that have not been confirmed yet, you’ll see reminders to confirm them next time you log in.
Subscribe to premium plans
MuckRock’s premium plans unlock powerful functionality in MuckRock Requests and DocumentCloud. We’ve update the subscription flow so that you can quickly see all the features and functionality that a premium subscription unlocks.
And we’ve made it easier for power users, who might be part of more than one MuckRock organization, to manage premium subscriptions for multiple organizations.
Find and join your organization with ease
With this release, we’ve made it much easier for new and existing users to join organizations, minimizing waiting time and smoothing out our invitation process.
Allow users to join your organization automatically
We’re making it much easier to add staff and students to organizations. Now, you can set any organization that you manage to allow users to join based on their email domain with our “auto join” feature.
There are a few restrictions – before you can allow users to join by email domain, you will need to go through our verification. Users will be required to confirm the email address before they can use it to join your organization, but that is fast and easy. You can still invite individual users to join, whether or not you enable auto join for your domain.
To enable Auto Join, log in and look under “Edit Organization” at https://accounts.muckrock.com – select “Allow Auto Join” and review the domains that will be allowed to join. 
Checking the “Allow Auto Join” button will enable this feature and you can add which email domains you’d like in the corresponding email domain management page which is linked underneath.
Any users with a confirmed email address at the appropriate domain users will see the organization on their profile page under “Organizations you can join”.
When the user clicks on the organization, they will see a “Join” button where there is usually a “Request to join” button (which requires manual admin approval).
For new users
New users will now see organizations you can join automatically based on your confirmed email address, and will have access to a list of pending invitations. You’ll still have the option to search for organizations as well.
For existing users
Pending invites and organizations you can join automatically are also now listed directly on your profile page, which means you spend less time digging through your inbox to find an old invite or having to request a new invite from your admin.
For admins
Pending invites can now be resent directly from the “Manage Members” view.
There’s more to come
We’ve got more great updates to MuckRock accounts planned for the coming months, including improvements to account pages, organization management and more. We’re also working hard to make new tools and services available to MuckRock account holders.
