[support] Users without email addresses?

[Marc Poris]

Daniel,

Take a look at http://drupal.org/project/user_import and 
http://drupal.org/project/userplus -- they will either provide something 
good enough for your purposes or they'll give you a nice head start on 
writing your own code.

Marc


Daniel Carrera wrote:
> 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.
>