Going through my users I noticed that a startlingly large amount of them were users who had registered but never activated. Suspicious that there was a problem delivering e-mails, I've changed the activation type to instant.
What's the practical purpose of forcing e-mail activation? It's so easy to create an e-mail address these days, so I wonder if the benefits outweigh the risks.
Activation. That's the purpose. Or else thousands of bots would sign up on your forums. You force e-mail activation so only a real user can activate the account.
There's SMS activation these days, but I don't think it's as practical yet.
(2011-03-02, 07:35 PM)faviouz Wrote: [ -> ]Activation. That's the purpose. Or else thousands of bots would sign up on your forums. You force e-mail activation so only a real user can activate the account.
Isn't that what captcha is for? Does this actually stop spammers?
Email activation just leaves you with thousands of unactivated users XD. In my opinion captcha doesnt work anymore either
(2011-03-02, 07:32 PM)Uncontrol Wrote: [ -> ]What's the practical purpose of forcing e-mail activation?
If you don't, chances are that someone puts in someone elses email address, and then makes your forum spam the owner of that address by sending PMs to himself or some such.
Also the verification step just increases the chances that people won't put a wrong mail address by accident, and that features like reset password will actually work when required.
Also there is the increased protection against spammers / idiots - yes it's easy to get more mail addresses but even so, it's an obstacle. The captcha alone is unfortunately, ineffective these days.
All in all, I see only benefits for email activation. Of course, your forum should be able to reliably send emails. If this isn't the case then you should fix your setup. Unreliable email will also hurt existing members which use mail subscriptions.
(2011-03-02, 09:33 PM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]If you don't, chances are that someone puts in someone elses email address, and then makes your forum spam the owner of that address by sending PMs to himself or some such.
^ This. Email activation was never intended as a security measure.
I too changed it to instant verification. Too often members aren't receiving their activation email. Never had a problem with bots either, no concerns.
It seems my emails are working, so likely that they're getting junked or simply not being read. Either way, I've switched to instant. One less buffer between a new user getting registered and posting.
Mass mail, even though its hardly used.
if a user does not get the activation email, they can always come back to the site and request it.
however you will need to make regular checks of your servers status with regard to blacklists so that visitors can get the emails
you can also use forum cleaner plugin that will clean up unactivated users