Managing Requirement to Verify Email

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Hi, I just started a forum site for a group I am doing some work with. First, let me say the forum looks really sharp and in general it seems to be working well.

One thing I have had some problem with is that I have set it up so that registered users email must be validated. This means an email is sent when a user registeres and they must use the link to complete the registration process. This has been difficult to manage because:
1. There is no way to see that the email was successfully sent.
2. There is no way to see what users have registered but not successfully completed the registration process through the link
3. There is no way to re-send a registration email to a user who says they never received it so I'm not sure what to do with this user. There were no errors in the logs at the time they registered.

For now I think I am going to turn off the requirement because without these tools it really can't be managed very reliably. I think some of these tool might be a good future upgrade.

Thanks for the work you have done so far, it looks great.
[originally posted on jforum.net by parisila]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

One of the problems is that by definition mail is handed off to your mail transport agent (MTA) like sendmail or postfix. After that there is no way to communicate back to JForum that things did or didn't work - the protocol simply doesn't support that. The best you can do is to see if there are no mail errors on your server. Even then all you know is that the mail left your server - you still have no idea if it really made it.

Your second point is valid. It would nice to have a way to see what users have not confirmed their registration. While not perfect you can look in the database and do something like:

select username, user_actkey, user_email, user_regdate from jforum_users
where user_actkey != '' order by user_regdate;

And I also agree with the third point. You can do it manually for them but this is a bit of a pain too. For the few users I've had an issue with I've just deleted them from the jforum_users table and let them start over.
[originally posted on jforum.net by stdunbar]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

If you want some of these issues to be added to JForum in the feature, please register your wish by creatinga new Feature Request, at http://www.jforum.net/jira

Thanks.
Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

stdunbar wrote:

One of the problems is that by definition mail is handed off to your mail transport agent (MTA) like sendmail or postfix. After that there is no way to communicate back to JForum that things did or didn't work - the protocol simply doesn't support that. The best you can do is to see if there are no mail errors on your server. Even then all you know is that the mail left your server - you still have no idea if it really made it.

I agree we cannot know if the mail reached its destination but we can see that it was successfully queued to be sent. I would envision something similar to the way the test SMTP message works from the admin config panel.

Rafael, Thanks - I will make a post to the feature request.


[originally posted on jforum.net by parisila]