[support] Users without email addresses?

[Christopher M. Jones]

As for the email address issue, I ran into a similar problem, where I 
was batch creating users for whom I had no email address. What I did was 
to generate a csv of all relevant user data, where the email address was 
calculated. It was something like dummy01 at nowhere.com. Everybody had a 
unique email, even though it wasn't a real one. And as far as I can 
tell, this doesn't matter, except that the user cannot retrieve their 
password, since this works by sending a link to the user's email 
address. In your case you could make the address from their student ids, 
again ensuring they are unique.



Marc Poris wrote:
> 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.
>>   
> 
>