[support] Users without email addresses?

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I have an unusual problem:

We provide a service for schools. Students make Drupal accounts and use 
it to do a school project. Problem is, many students don't have email 
and indeed, the school doesn't *want* the students to have email. Worse, 
they want the teacher to create the student accounts.

I don't like this, yes it's stupid, but there is no chance of me 
changing their mind about this. I'm hoping that someone here might help 
me find a good solution for this problem.

As part of the service, we have a custom web application that I wrote. 
This application already has a record of all the students and teachers 
and schools. So, for example, I could consider using this application to 
insert new users into the Drupal database. The teacher clicks a button 
that says "make Drupal accounts for all my students" and a PHP script 
makes the accounts.

Could that work?

Personally, I am afraid of editing the Drupal database directly, but 
perhaps there is a safe API I can use? Or is it reasonably safe to 
insert records into the Drupal database by hand?

I can see problems with this idea (e.g. what do I use as user names? 
Student names are not unique). But I can't think of anything better. 
Does anyone have a better idea?


I don't really know any good way to solve this problem. The problem is 
not urgent. For the time being we can get a staff member with admin 
access to create student accounts using fake email addresses. But I hope 
to find a better long-term solution.

Thanks for the help.

Daniel.