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Invalid Activation Key Randomness

  • @wp-pbeast

    Member

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Running WP 3.2.1 and BP 1.5 — I know these aren’t the lastest versions, but I’ve made enough changes to the core to accomplish my needs that updating would prove problematic. I know I know, bad bad. That said, I know first thoughts to fix any issues would be to update, but this problem has occurred for me on fresh installs as well. I’ve also scoured the forums and various other resources to help try and identify the source of this issue and have found other sites experiencing this problem, but nobody seems to have a clear picture of why this might be happening. The problem is also very elusive as it’s very hard to reproduce due to its randomness. I’ve tried deactivating plugins to no avail.

    Here’s the story: A very small percentage of users who register on my site, after completing their sign-up and receiving an activation email—upon clicking on the activation link, they get the :else from activate.php that produces the following: “Please provide a valid activation key.”, even though if I look in wp-users in mysql, I can see that user_status has correctly been set from 2>0. No matter what they do, even by entering the key from the querystring in the activation email, you can’t get passed that page/else. However, and most users couldn’t know this, if they exit activate.php and, for example, return to the homepage where there are login inputs, they can successfully login in with the username and password they just activated, and from there everything is golden.

    In other words, for a seemingly random and small percentage of users, activate.php isn’t working properly and they get stuck on “Please provide a valid activation key.”, even though they should never see that due to the successful activation within wp_users. I thought perhaps it might have something to do with creating the profile in one browser, and then when the end-user receives their activation email, their email application is opening a different browser and they’re getting this error, but I’m unable to verify this as the issue because I’ve also tested this and it’s very rarely and randomly reproducible.

    The big what-is-going-on-here is, what could be causing a very small percentage of users to experience this while most do not? I have found reports of this happening on other sites but haven’t been able to find a solution or perhaps a reason.

    Has anybody experienced this? Any solutions?
    Any and all thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
    Thanks so much!

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • @djpaul

    Keymaster

    12 years, 7 months ago

    > Running WP 3.2.1 and BP 1.5 — I know these aren’t the lastest versions, but I’ve made enough changes to the core to accomplish my needs that updating would prove problematic

    If you changed BuddyPress, what did you change? Are we missing a filter or action somewhere that would allow you to avoid hacking core?

    @djpaul

    Keymaster

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Also, there have been a few posts about activation keys not working. Most of the time, the cause appears to be related to the server not sending emails consistently, and other things outside our control.

    But, if you can get an activation key on a clean install that, when you click on the link in the email, it doesn’t work, let us know what the URL looks like (even if you replace the domain) and what the key is. It’s not impossible there’s an obscure bug somewhere.

    @wp-pbeast

    Member

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Paul, thanks for the quick reply. Regarding why I hacked the core; being perfectly straight with you, it’s probably not so much to do with missing filters or actions as, when I began using bp to accomodate our project, I would say my bp knowledge was at best remedial, and because of the turnaround time of getting the ball rolling I found that I could accomplish my needs much faster by editing the core files vs. trying to figure out how the filters worked. Backwards, I know—now I’ve got some idea of how things work, but I’ve already made so many small changes that I fear it would futile to try and identify them and update. I suppose I could at some point try and diff everything but at the current point it seems a monumental undertaking.

    That said, I can confirm that the server is operating properly and emails are getting sent effectively. As previously noted, the activation is taking place via the activation link, but for some reason that small percentage of users is experiencing the aforementioned, where they’re being prompted for an activation key even though they’ve just clicked on the activation link from the email and their user_status has been updated to 0. Also, as of about a week or so ago, we’re now going through sendgrid so I can monitor every email that goes out via wp/bp. The activation issue we’re having was happening well before and after the sendgrid implementation so I also know it’s not the url conversion that takes place from whitelabeling. What I’m going to try and do is keep creating dummy users in a test environment until I can hopefully reproduce the error so that I may provide to you an example activation link that’s failing.

    Thanks so much!
    Scott

    @mystica

    Member

    12 years, 7 months ago

    hi,
    i’m getting the same error
    user can register, he gets the email with the verification key, so he confirms and can log in
    after logging in, the site redirects him to the activate page
    copying and pasting the key from the email inside the input text doesn’t work though
    he always gets redirected to the activate page
    any idea?

    @zigmok

    Member

    12 years, 6 months ago

    I guess that something broke. Im in the same situation. However, it looks like the user really gets activated but instead of sending him to the main page after a successful activation, it is sending the user to the activation page again… It just happens the first time.

    @bollocks187

    Member

    12 years, 6 months ago

    I have consistently found the activation process to be a problem.

    There should be a “plugin” that allows Admin to work around the problem.
    In my case I have the following two problems cases:

    1) User Registration – the BP requires a password
    2) Email sent to user for activation – user forgets to respond or loses email.
    3) User tries to log on and gets they need to activate account
    4) User has lost the bloody email
    5) No clear method to resend another activation key
    6) users tries to register again and wants to keep the same user name
    7) gets rejected because the”username” is already in use

    @bollocks187

    Member

    12 years, 6 months ago

    Second Problem

    How to turn off password required in registration page of BP/WP the reason is I have another plugin that admin grants access:New user Approval.

    Once approved this plugin sends out in an email a NEW password.

    User gets frustrated as they have already entered a password at registration they arethen “forced” to use another password once they have been approved for access.

    Net is how do I turn off password required at registration!

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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