Users without email addresses?
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.
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.
Thanks! Both of these options are better than what we are doing now. The first one (user_import) seems to be the closest to what I need. I hope that they make a Drupal 6 version before I migrate to Drupal 6. Daniel. 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.
If you end up writing your own module, then you also want to look at: http://api.drupal.org/api/function/user_save/ Which is the function that these modules should use for createing new users. Dave -----Original Message----- From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Daniel Carrera Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 7:54 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: Re: [support] Users without email addresses? Thanks! Both of these options are better than what we are doing now. The first one (user_import) seems to be the closest to what I need. I hope that they make a Drupal 6 version before I migrate to Drupal 6. Daniel. 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.
-- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
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@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.
Yeah, that sounds like it should work - <student-id>@foo.com And I could even use that to help me match a Drupal account with a student in my custom application. Thanks. Christopher M. Jones wrote:
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@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.
Yeah, that sounds like it should work - <student-id>@foo.com
If I were a hacker, I'd sit at foo.com or nowhere.com, and wait for the emails to come rolling in. For fake emails, always use @example.com: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt To keep student emails properly fake, you could also create a stub module with hook_form_alter to add a validate method to the user-edit forms. That could check that the user was either (a) a teacher or (b) their email was of the format firstname.lastname@example.com . J-P
Or you can simply use the module http://drupal.org/project/reroute_email ----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Carrera" <daniel.carrera@zmsl.com> To: <support@drupal.org> Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 10:35 AM Subject: Re: [support] Users without email addresses?
J-P Stacey wrote:
Yeah, that sounds like it should work - <student-id>@foo.com
If I were a hacker, I'd sit at foo.com or nowhere.com, and wait for the emails to come rolling in.
Unless foo.com is my own domain. That's what I was planning to do.
Daniel. -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
Unless foo.com is my own domain. That's what I was planning to do.
Wow: you own foo.com ? Can I buy it off you? :) (It does depend on your relationship with the school, as to whether they'd be happy with that solution going forwards. You're best placed to answer that, of course!) Cheers, J-P
A non-Drupal but educational response might be to use the free - student emails from Gaggle.net (http://www.gaggle.net/gen?_template=/templates/gaggle/html/index.jsp) - I used these for students when I worked for Los Angeles Unified School District. The free version has ads but teachers can monitor traffic and there is extensive filtering. Steve Kessler Denver DataMan 303-587-4428 -----Original Message----- From: J-P Stacey [mailto:jp.stacey@torchbox.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 9:22 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: Re: [support] Users without email addresses?
Yeah, that sounds like it should work - <student-id>@foo.com
If I were a hacker, I'd sit at foo.com or nowhere.com, and wait for the emails to come rolling in. For fake emails, always use @example.com: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt To keep student emails properly fake, you could also create a stub module with hook_form_alter to add a validate method to the user-edit forms. That could check that the user was either (a) a teacher or (b) their email was of the format firstname.lastname@example.com . J-P -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
That's an interesting idea. Thanks. Steve Kessler wrote:
A non-Drupal but educational response might be to use the free - student emails from Gaggle.net (http://www.gaggle.net/gen?_template=/templates/gaggle/html/index.jsp) - I used these for students when I worked for Los Angeles Unified School District. The free version has ads but teachers can monitor traffic and there is extensive filtering.
Steve Kessler Denver DataMan 303-587-4428
-----Original Message----- From: J-P Stacey [mailto:jp.stacey@torchbox.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 9:22 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: Re: [support] Users without email addresses?
Yeah, that sounds like it should work - <student-id>@foo.com
If I were a hacker, I'd sit at foo.com or nowhere.com, and wait for the emails to come rolling in.
For fake emails, always use @example.com:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt
To keep student emails properly fake, you could also create a stub module with hook_form_alter to add a validate method to the user-edit forms. That could check that the user was either (a) a teacher or (b) their email was of the format firstname.lastname@example.com .
J-P
If you are adding users via API, there shouldn't be any need to supply an email address. This has worked fine for us for a long time in Drupal 5.x: $new_user = user_save('', array( 'name' => $name, 'pass' => $pass, 'roles' => array(), 'status' => 1 ) ); - Marc Daniel Carrera wrote:
That's an interesting idea. Thanks.
Steve Kessler wrote:
A non-Drupal but educational response might be to use the free - student emails from Gaggle.net (http://www.gaggle.net/gen?_template=/templates/gaggle/html/index.jsp) - I used these for students when I worked for Los Angeles Unified School District. The free version has ads but teachers can monitor traffic and there is extensive filtering.
Steve Kessler Denver DataMan 303-587-4428
-----Original Message----- From: J-P Stacey [mailto:jp.stacey@torchbox.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 9:22 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: Re: [support] Users without email addresses?
Yeah, that sounds like it should work - <student-id>@foo.com
If I were a hacker, I'd sit at foo.com or nowhere.com, and wait for the emails to come rolling in.
For fake emails, always use @example.com:
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt
To keep student emails properly fake, you could also create a stub module with hook_form_alter to add a validate method to the user-edit forms. That could check that the user was either (a) a teacher or (b) their email was of the format firstname.lastname@example.com .
J-P
I am using Drupal 6.6 and forum module. I am wondering if I can submit a forum reply without preview. Can anyone help me to find where I can set this up.
I found the solution: /admin/content/node-type/forum, Under Comment settings, set Preview comment to optional. This should do the trick -----Original Message----- From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Johnny Xiao Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 11:25 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: [support] submit Forum reply without preview I am using Drupal 6.6 and forum module. I am wondering if I can submit a forum reply without preview. Can anyone help me to find where I can set this up. -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
I am using Mail Editor Module for editing my subscription emails. Since I have multiple taxonomies associate with one node, I wonder if it is Possible to add more patterns to in the pattern list, so I can use them in Subscription emails to distinguish different nodes. (in my case, some of my Nodes have same names but with different taxonomy)
I am using Subscriptions module for notifying users. Currently "Send subscriptions notifications" is pre-checked by default under publishing options, I wonder if there is a way to make it not checked by default. Can anyone give me some hints? Thanks
Although most users can override their settings on the subscriptions tab of their user page (My Accounts), there is also user defaults tab in the administer->Site Configuration->Subscriptions Dave -----Original Message----- From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Johnny Xiao Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2009 1:59 PM To: support@drupal.org Subject: [support] How to make "Send subscriptions notifications" notpre-checked I am using Subscriptions module for notifying users. Currently "Send subscriptions notifications" is pre-checked by default under publishing options, I wonder if there is a way to make it not checked by default. Can anyone give me some hints? Thanks -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
I am trying to merge result of swish module to core search result. I am using module_load_include to include swish.module file, then I call function swish_search to get the search result. So far, I have no luck to populate the result from swish.module. Am I missing something or this approach is not feasible. Thanks for any hints or suggestions.
I am wondering if this feature can be added to core search function. If not, how can I customize it? Thanks
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Johnny Xiao <johnny.xiao@q1labs.com> wrote:
I am wondering if this feature can be added to core search function. If not, how can I customize it?
I haven't heard of anyone working to include file search in core, but you can try the http://drupal.org/project/search_files module.
Thanks -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
Thank you for replying. I am using swish-e module which does the same thing as search_file, but it also provide separate tab for viewing list of files contain search phrase. My users wonder if these files can be merged into default search result. I am thinking to include file indexing part in the core search function, how hard would that be? -----Original Message----- From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Cog Rusty Sent: Thursday, March 05, 2009 11:47 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: Re: [support] Is it possible to add search file to Drupal coresearch function On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Johnny Xiao <johnny.xiao@q1labs.com> wrote:
I am wondering if this feature can be added to core search function. If not, how can I customize it?
I haven't heard of anyone working to include file search in core, but you can try the http://drupal.org/project/search_files module.
Thanks -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
-- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
participants (9)
-
Christopher M. Jones -
Cog Rusty -
Daniel Carrera -
J-P Stacey -
Johnny Xiao -
Marc Poris -
Metzler, David -
Nicolas Tostin -
Steve Kessler