Face ID and fingerprint sign-in on a demo site

Passkey sign-in — the Sign in with Face ID or fingerprint button on the members’ app — is switched off completely while a site is in demo mode. The button is not shown, and every endpoint behind it refuses.

A demo is a shared thing. Strangers sign in one after another, often to the same handful of accounts, and the data is wiped on a schedule. A passkey is the opposite of all of that: it is tied to one person’s phone or laptop, and it is a way in that needs no password. Whoever registered one would become the only person able to use that account, and the next visitor would find themselves locked out of a demo by a stranger’s fingerprint. It would also survive the reset that is supposed to put the demo back to a known state.

Nothing needs setting. It follows demo mode itself, and comes straight back when the site is not a demo.

Common questions

The button still appears on our demo.

Update to 9.99.210 or later. Before that the guard covered only the shared demo administrator account, so the button was correctly hidden for that one login and still offered to every other account on the site — which is the same problem wearing a different account name.

Somebody already registered one. Are we stuck?

No. Existing passkeys stop working the moment demo mode is on, because sign-in refuses them outright rather than checking them. A demo reset now clears the lot as well, rather than only those against the shared account.

Will our real club site lose passkeys?

No. This applies only while PVL_DEMO_MODE is switched on. A real club site is unaffected, and passkeys there work exactly as before.