[development] Sign-up procedure

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Lyal Avery <lyal.avery at gmail.com>:

> There are several contributed modules that deal with the situation you're
> describing Karthik.
>
> For instance,
> http://drupal.org/project/advuser
> http://drupal.org/project/account_reminder
>
> Either of these would be a great starting point to filtering out the
> unwanted users.
>
> On 4/17/07, Karthik <narakasura at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> In a site with ~33000 users, I found that about ~1900 sign-ups were
>> never completed and essentially clutter up the user table. I am
>> looking for opinions on the pros and cons, if any, of streamlining the
>> default sign-up procedure to:
>>

What do you mean never completed?

>> a) Sign-up form only contains an e-mail field that the user fills in
>> to confirm authenticity.
>> b) The e-mail field is stored in a separate table along with the
>> sign-up URL token.
>> c) The sign-up e-mail contains nothing besides a sign-up URL which the
>> user clicks as opposed to the current e-mail which contains a number
>> of choices.
>> d) The user is presented with a web page where he selects his
>> username, password and assorted details (other than his e-mail for the
>> first time) and is logged in immediately.
>> e) Only after successfully completing step d) is the user account
>> added into the user table.
>> f) Perhaps an e-mail is sent upon successful completion of the
>> procedure for future reference.
>>

I like the way Drupal does it.  Really, if people want to remember your 
site they sign up.  They may never login that is OK.  You give them 
reminders in email and give sales promotion to the site.  I.E.: In the 
email to the users give them a reason to login.

In the registration instructions be sure you tell them that a computer 
generated password is given by email.  Make sure that they understand 
that an invalid or bounced email address will only cause the account to 
be deleted.  This helps reduce the amount of stupid accounts.  I use 
the legal module on my sites which allows you to add fields to the 
registration form.

Earnie -- http://for-my-kids.com