Topic: over 1000 not activated users.. what do you suggest we do with them?

over 1000 not activated users.. what do you suggest we do with them?

kriskl
Participant

@kriskl

14 years, 7 months ago

Hi!

After using wordpress/buddypress for almost a month
and its activation system ..
we have over 1,000 users who never activated their accounts

i am sure over 50% of these are valid registrations,. but users probably are careless or never found the activation email etc..
our site is not really for computer people, and many users may not be aware..

so, what do you do with them?

do I manually activate them? Is there an option in wp-admin settings anywhere?

it’s a bit tedious to change things manually line by line in the database…

do I send them another activation email? (I assumed after 2 days.. the activation link expires..)

anyone has bright ideas?

thanks!

Viewing 19 replies - 1 through 19 (of 19 total)

Paul Wong-Gibbs
Keymaster

@djpaul

14 years, 7 months ago

Delete them? If their account isn’t activated, they aren’t using your website.

kriskl
Participant

@kriskl

14 years, 6 months ago

that’s the thing, I don’t want to loose them..

what if the activation email was in their junk folder or never reached them..

Hugo Ashmore
Participant

@hnla

14 years, 6 months ago

Both questions you need to investigate, if either of those are true you need to establish why otherwise you will struggle to ever grow your community, I would test ferociously the sending and receiving of emails and how your server might be configured, you may need an SPF record available so certain email servers don’t flag as spam i.e the likes of your hotmail accounts etc

Boone Gorges
Keymaster

@boonebgorges

14 years, 6 months ago

Signups (including non-activated users) are stored in wp_signups table. I have looked briefly but have never found a plugin for WP admins to manage these signups (activating accts from the Dashboard, resending activation emails, etc). Hard to believe, actually, as it seems like this is an area of great need.

Maybe this is something I’ll write myself, as I’ve had need of such a thing on multiple occasions and I’ve usually had to dig directly into the db to find the activation keys.

kriskl
Participant

@kriskl

14 years, 6 months ago

Yes! Please

This is really the essentials when it comes to registration.

of course, my fear is that our email address has been blacklisted by some servers, so there is probably nothing we can do, but
many other users simply.. have no idea they have to activate anything, and may have missed the email or the activation ,ink has already expired when they found it..

kris

Hugo Ashmore
Participant

@hnla

14 years, 6 months ago

But while waiting for Boone to code a plugin (there is one for activating signups that I’ve used on test beds, which I’ll look up when I get home) You must try and establish what has occurred kriskl, if you fear your server might have been blacklisted then it might be worth checking your domain against the blacklists? then you’ll know if you have any remedial work to do to get removed from the lists,. Find a user that you can send test signups to or an account you can check and see where the email is landing up – is it being marked as spam.

Hugo Ashmore
Participant

@hnla

14 years, 6 months ago

Boone there is this plugin which is really for dev setups where passing emails through the dev network is awkward so allows you to register a user normally then go into backend and manually approve using the activation id

WPMU Manual Member Approve:
http://mattkern.com/wpmu-manually-approve-new-members-on-local-install/

Would you believe though I just tried to run it on my local site and it’s broken! at least it’s throwing an undefined function error bp_page_title()

Haven’t time to look into that but it doesn’t look to much of an issue.

Of course this doesn’t get round the issue of letting those users know they have been activated and not really sure one wants to simply activate a bunch of accounts when the users are never going to know about it.

Of course once activated and once you have established you are sending emails correctly you might be able to work some means of adding everyone to a group and posting an update to that group that will send a notification out to email addresses?

Boone Gorges
Keymaster

@boonebgorges

14 years, 6 months ago

Thanks for the link – I’ll start with that plugin, so I don’t have to start from scratch.

techguy
Participant

@crashutah

14 years, 6 months ago

You don’t want to just activate random accounts. You might be activating a bunch of spam accounts for emails that don’t exist.

Seems like these are the functions you’d need:
-Resend activation email (possibly customize the email to admin’s desires)
-Manual activation for individual users (for those that contact you directly about activation)
-Clear users that haven’t activated (filtered by date)

Hugo Ashmore
Participant

@hnla

14 years, 6 months ago

Looks as though that plugin was failing possibly because it’s running before bp has loaded? at least it’s failing on any bp function that exists in header.php

Hugo Ashmore
Participant

@hnla

14 years, 6 months ago

This plugin might also be worth a look?

http://epicalex.com/new-user-email-set-up/

I originally used this to get round a problem of needing to manually add some new users to the system but didn’t want emails/activations being sent out immediately. It provides two very customizable sections one sent to admin one to new user, I simply swapped it round so that admin received the sign up email to a specially set up email account and the user got sent a “changes are afoot you will receive your login details shortly” type message, worked quite effectively.

kriskl
Participant

@kriskl

14 years, 6 months ago

thanks for your advice and replies
my fear re being blacklisted was a bit exaggerated, I have checked lost lists and our domain/ip is OK (only one place has one blacklisted)

in April overall for every 5 users, 1 did not activate the account
I am sure at least half of them are not spammers, I had a look at their email addresses,
so, I can only guess, users are not computer savvy.. and did not look at their junk email box for activation email etc..
I have change the form, so it tells them now to check junk folders. maybe this will help!

something else occurred to me
where do I change the default email address the activations email are sent from?
maybe this will help and emails won’t land in spam folders..

kind regards
Kris

Van Murray
Participant

@vanmurray

14 years, 5 months ago

@hnla and @boonebgorges: I found this plugin a while back and modified it to work with BuddyPress. Let me know if you need it still.

Anyone know how to stop sending the activation email? I don’t want to disable the activation function; I just want to stop sending the email automatically. I want to selectively send it. I figure I would just add this function to the manual approve plugin so I could either:
Manually Approve
Manually Send Activation Email
Delete the Signup

I’m getting killed with spam users (that are easily identifiable)
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/spam-blogs/

Stacy (non coder)
Participant

@functionmunchkin

14 years ago

@hlna . I also use manual approve with welcome pack to stop users from activating themselves. Manual approve works properly with the the new custom community bp theme, no header problems. ( I just have issues with welcome pack now since bp’s upgrade, one thing fixes and the other falters).

stefanbg
Member

@stefanbg

13 years, 10 months ago

Hello,
I have stumbled to this topic while searching how to change the time of activation link before it expires.
So, @kriskl how much time it takes before activation link expires when registering to your site?
I have similar problem. The default time of 2 hours looks like very insufficient for users. We have almost no spam registrations and still there are many abandoned registrations.
On the net there is no easily reachable info how to change this configuration. I have posted two threads on WP.com, still no news. Hope some of you people can help or give an idea where is that php that sets the time period.

10x

xavieremerson
Member

@xavieremerson

13 years, 9 months ago

hi,

I have the same situation that activation emails are not sending in my installation as well. Did you solved that problem? If you could help me please…
how to solve it?

In my system forgot password mails are working….

I don’t know whats the problem in activation mail…
Please help me…

Thanks in advance

sidjags
Member

@sidjags

13 years, 4 months ago

what about https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-activate-users/ WP Activate… i feel its slightly buggy with buddypress, but it does the job… problem is sometimes… if the refresh button is pressed multiple times on the user account confirmation screen… then the user gets created multiple times … but if u approve him once in wp activate.. the user doesnt go away… he still remains.. check it out though.

Firat dede
Member

@firat-dede

13 years, 2 months ago

very bad failure… I hah same problem now I disabled activation.

Boone Gorges
Keymaster

@boonebgorges

13 years, 2 months ago

I did end up writing the plugin I talked about earlier. It’s called Unconfirmed: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/unconfirmed/