We Got In to Pottermore… So What’s Next?

On the Chamber of Secrets forum, the Magic Quill challenge has been affectionately dubbed “Harry Potter and the Week without Sleep.” But now it’s over… so what happens next?

Earlier in the week, I mentioned that it’s really a bad idea to purchase Pottermore Beta test accounts – not only because buying and selling (and trading) accounts is against Pottermore Terms and Conditions, but because early access does not guarantee immediate entry, only early entry. As I wrote then:

None of us knows right now exactly when we will receive our Welcome email. For some of us, it could be on the day after the Magic Quill contest ends. For others of us, it could be 3-7 weeks later. And for some of us, it could be as late as the day before Pottermore opens to the general public.

So that’s what’s next. We await our Welcome Letters. Because this is a Beta test, some of us will get in sooner than others, and the Beta group will build up its numbers throughout the test, leading up to the Pottermore opening in October.

Since we don’t know exactly what Pottermore is looking for in the Beta test group, though, we really don’t know who is getting in first.

Fan speculation falls into different camps:

First come first serve: One group of fans speculates that the first people to receive Welcome Letters will be the people who registered for early access on the first day. A variation of this idea is that Pottermore will let first-day people in during the first week; second-day people in during the second week, etc. – all the way up into the seventh week.

Wide demographics: Another group of fans speculates that Pottermore will want its earliest Beta testers to be comprised of a wide diversity of people – people of every age, every language, every nationality, etc. – so that different groups of people can test out features and offer suggestions for improvement.

A lot depends on what Pottermore is looking for during the Beta test. Does Pottermore want feedback on features? Or does it just want people to sign in and play with the site and and find out what functionality breaks under a load so that the tech team can then figure out what needs to be fixed before the site opens to the public?

If it’s the first option, then Pottermore will most likely want diversity in its earliest test group. If it’s the latter option, then the demographics of the earliest test group don’t really matter. Pottermore could just as easily let people in according to the day they registered.

A note on keeping your account secure:

I hate to say this, because it seems to feed into the scaremongering about Pottermore account security, but a 3rd party did try to access my account today. That 3rd party was unsuccessful, but here’s what happened…

I got an email from Pottermore, telling me that there had been a reset request for my username. I did not initiate the request, and the email did tell me that I could ignore the message if I had not initiated the request. So that is what I did. I ignored – and then deleted – the message.

Because the message accounted for the possibility that I had not initiated the request, I do assume that the email really was a message from Pottermore, and not just some phishing scheme. However, here are a couple of possible scenarios for what happened – neither of which is particularly savory:

Possibility A – Someone tried signing in on my account: Okay, this is what I think happened. I think that a 3rd party went to Pottermore and tried to sign in using my username. That party then tried to get my password by requesting a password reset. The password reset email, however, went to the email address on my Pottermore account (an address that I have never given to anybody except Pottermore – and no, it does not include any username that anybody has ever heard or seen me use).

Here’s the good news: If a 3rd party tried to sign in as me, then the Pottermore security system worked. I got the reset email. The hacker who wanted to get in to my account did not.

Here is the bad news: It may be safer not to post the numbers in our Pottermore usernames publicly. I will be happy to delete numbers from the end of your username for you if you ask me to do so in the Comments at the bottom of this post. Just make sure that you sign in under the same name that you signed in under before so that I can easily find your username. Since some people may not want their numbers deleted, I thought I would do this on a request basis, rather than just go through and delete all numbers.

Possibility B – Someone tried phishing for my account information: Okay, this is not what I think happened, but it is possible that someone somehow managed to figure out my Pottermore email address and sent a phishing email to my account.

You really need to be wary of phishing emails. If they are done well, they will look like an official email from Pottermore. They will direct you to a website that mimics Pottermore. And they will ask you to login with your account information on this fake Pottermore site that looks like the real Pottermore site. And then, if you do login, they have your account information, and they can lock you out.

Here are some tips on how to protect yourself from phishing. One of the basics is always to look at the true email address on any email asking you to login somewhere. And another basic is to look at the URL in your address bar to make sure that you are on the site you are supposed to be on… or better yet, to just type in the correct login address into the address bar yourself.

So anyway, that’s what’s next. We wait for our Welcome emails. And we protect the security on our Pottermore accounts.

But pretty soon, the doors of Pottermore will open to the first Beta testers, and we will begin to hear more details about the site.

Good luck!