Linking a phone
Every user links their own device from their own profile screen. An administrator cannot do it for them — linking needs that person’s handset.
What the user does
- 1Open Users → Profile (Your Profile in the toolbar) and find the U2 Secured Authenticator section.
- 2Press Link my authenticator. A pairing code appears and the screen waits.
- 3Redeem that code in the U2 Secured Authenticator app. The profile screen notices on its own — there is nothing further to press.
- 4Save the ten recovery codes it then shows, and only then confirm with “I have saved these”.
The recovery codes are shown once
Ten single-use codes, displayed at the moment of linking and never displayed again. They are what gets a user in when their phone is flat or lost — and when U2 Secured itself is unreachable, since they are verified against this site’s own database and make no outbound call. Someone who clicks past that screen has no offline way back in. A fresh set can be generated later from the same profile screen, which retires the old one.
After linking
- The profile screen reads “Your account is linked” and shows how many recovery codes remain, so a user can see they are down to their last one before that becomes the moment they are locked out.
- Unlink is on the same screen, and turns the second factor off for that account.
- If the encryption key and sodium are both present, linking also shows a TOTP secret to add to a backup authenticator app. If they are not, the screen says why the option is missing instead of quietly dropping it.
How a WordPress user maps to a U2 enrolment
The join key is a random per-site id plus the WordPress user id — deliberately not the email address. U2 matches identifiers exactly, so keying on email would silently orphan an enrolment the day a user changed theirs, and the site prefix keeps multisite networks from colliding on user id.