Create your own account
You can open a support portal account yourself, and it is one form. It asks for your first and last name, your company name, your company email address — typed twice, because a typo in that one field is what would leave you unable to reach your own account — and a password of at least 12 characters, which you choose yourself. A job title and a photo are optional, and you can add or change either afterwards.
Use your work address rather than a personal one. The domain is how we work out whether your company already has an account, and that decides what happens next.
The form is the registration page, which is also where the Create an account button on the sign-in page goes — so you do not have to keep the address to hand.
What happens after you send it
We email you a link to confirm the address. You do not have to wait for it to arrive — the password you just chose works straight away — but confirming the address is what unlocks your free licence. Nothing else waits on it.
The link lasts seven days. If yours has expired by the time you get to it, the Licences page in the portal has a button that sends a fresh one, and the new link replaces the old.
Sign in at the support portal. That is where tickets, licences and messages all live.
If somebody at your company already has an account
Signing up does not give your company a second account. If the domain of your email address already belongs to a company here, your signup is recorded as a request to join that company instead, and one of its admins approves it. Splitting one customer’s boxes, licences and tickets across two accounts is what this avoids.
You are emailed either way, approved or not, so you are never left waiting on an answer you have no way of seeing. Until a request is approved you hold no seat, and none of that company’s tickets or licences are visible to you.
Addresses at the consumer providers — gmail, outlook and the like — are never matched to a company this way. A signup from one of those always gets a company of its own.
If a colleague would rather add you
There is a route that involves neither us nor the registration page. Somebody at your company who already has the portal can give you one of the account’s seats from their own Account settings page, and you are emailed a link to set a password. A company that signed itself up starts with three seats.
A person holds a seat on one company account at a time. If you already have a seat somewhere else, that invitation is refused and you will need to talk to us.
An admin can also make a colleague a second admin, so an account whose only admin leaves is not stranded.
Both of those are done from the same page, and are described in Adding people to your support account.
When BlueDot opens the account for you
We still create accounts ourselves, and two things cause it: taking a free licence — the Grafana dashboard pack, for instance — or buying something. You fill nothing in. We create a company account from your email address and your company name, and that account is what holds your tickets, your licences, your support ticket balance and your seats.
You become the account admin. You are emailed a link to set your own password: no password is ever sent to you, and nobody at BlueDot can see the one you choose. The link is WordPress’s own password-setup link, so if it has expired by the time you get to it, use "Lost your password?" at sign-in with the same email address and a fresh one arrives.
Buying an account through the store
[PLACEHOLDER: the store is not built yet. When it ships, this section describes paying for a licence or for support tickets through it. Do not write the steps until the flow exists; a documented checkout that does not work is worse than no section at all.]
Until then, a purchase is arranged with BlueDot directly and the account is created the way this article already describes.
Written from includes/registration.php (bds_register_submission), includes/companies.php (bds_create_company_account) and includes/admin-companies.php (bds_handle_create_account). If the portal changes, check this article against that code.