Onboarding new members

Update: I've fixed some permission settings to now send important email notifications (such as that you started a new thread and here's a link to it, or that topics you've posted in/are watching have received replies) even if you have unsubscribed from the mailing list. Unsubscribing from the mailing list now only removes you from things such as our monthly newsletter, recommended topics you might be interested in, and other types of reengagement campaigns.

Still working on coming up with a solution for email verifications.

What about SMS text verification? Probably more expense, although I'm not sure how much.

SMS can be pricey and therefore doesn't make sense for a free community.

Also, the purpose of email verification is to confirm we have a valid email address to email notifications, newsletters, etc. If we verify an account with SMS, it doesn't help us confirming the authenticity of the email address, and therefore we still can't email them, add them to our mailing list, etc.

Unsubscribing from the mailing list now only removes you from things such as our monthly newsletter, recommended topics you might be interested in, and other types of reengagement campaigns.

To elaborate further, our email is broken down into transactional emails (which are typically notifications, don't have an unsubscribe link, and are sent even if you're opted out from receiving community emails) and marketing emails (which are typically things like our newsletters, reengagement campaigns, etc., do have an unsubscribe link, and do not get sent if you're opted out from receiving community emails).

All that I did was make some tweaks as to which way certain emails are classified. Specifically, I had previously had email updates to topics you're watching flagged as promotional, but upon rethinking it, I think it makes sense to classify these as transactional.

Should this part of the onboarding process simply tell the user that their post or topic won't go live until they verify their email? What if the verification email never comes?

Unless you connect through Facebook or the likes, this is a normal onboarding process.

B.t.w. it is also an additional hurdle for hit-and-run spammers.

For the very short period of time that we did not allow posts until emails were verified, about 15 years ago, I would get anywhere from 5 to 10 emails every week of members complaining their email verification email never arrived, or they tried to request a lost password reset and it never came through.

In about 25% of those cases, their ISPs were blocking email from us entirely. In the other 75% of those cases, the emails took 10+ minutes to come in, and during that time, they signed up multiple times in a row trying to get it to work, etc.

I'm a member of a handful of forums for forum owners, and in talking with other forum owners, it became clear that, unless you intend to run a small community where you want to manually approve each new registration that comes in, it's not feasible or practical to require email verification before allowing posting.

I think the missing piece to the puzzle was the accidental bug that was introduced about 6 months ago (eek!) that broke the alert message that people with unverified accounts should have been getting. Something else we used to do is show an alert at the top of every page of the site, and we stopped doing that a couple of years ago as well.

The best thing, and what most sites use, is to not allow a user to post anything until they verify their email address.

Not that it'd matter much in the specific case of the homework kiddo not responding to comments, as that's never their intent. They just dump their assignment on a dozen sites and if they have no working solution they can turn in appear within a few hours move on.

None of those things are my experience. Almost all vBulletin and Xenforo forums I use do not require email verification to post.

As you may know, I am also very active in forums for forum owners, and have been for a very long time, and I know that email activation to post is a big pain point across many forums.

So I took a few minutes to do some research and see if the landscape had changed without me realizing it, and I discovered the largest forum of them all, Reddit, does not require email verification to post.

About Reddit. I had to accumulate Karma to post there. The rules on how to do that vary it seems with the subreddit.

Also, Reddit is far more harsh at times. I don't think I see a tagline but they use flair. Taglines here are often spam.

When you say taglines, are you referring to our forum signatures? What is your definition of spam? Spam is defined as unsolicited communication sent in bulk.

Forum signatures are not unsolicited. On the contrary, you're actually prompted when you join to create a forum signature that links to websites you're affiliated with.

Forum signatures are also not delivered by the poster in bulk. They, instead, are created and managed by our platform (not the poster), where we have full control over the font size, maximum length, maximum number of lines, etc., appear by one at a time, only when the poster contributes a post, and they only show up for logged in members (so as to never be seen by Googlebot or affect SEO). They are meant to be a way to thank the poster for participating in our forums, and in exchange allowing them to share and promote their website or whatever it is they're working on to other forum members.

About Reddit. I had to accumulate Karma to post there.

It depends on the rules of the specific subreddit. But reddit, as a whole, does not require email verification to post. Specific subreddits sometimes implement their own unique rules that are stricter than those of the federation.

I wrote about Karma and rules of the subreddit. I like Reddit's flair over taglines. Whatever it's called, Reddit's way is superior IMO. Taglines seem to be from the long ago now.

I'm still unsure of what you mean by taglines. Do you mean DaniWeb's forum signatures? Or do you mean DaniWeb's user titles (e.g. "Nothing to see here.")?

Yeah. They call it flair on reddit. A term that I believe they got from the movie, Office Space. Incidentally, the actual company that they were spoofing in the movie ended up dropping the flair requirement because people kept telling them how stupid it was.

I absolutely refuse to acknowledge anything from Office Space. Dumbest. Movie. Ever. And then, at the end, he decides he wants to be a construction worker?

Completely off topic but...

In the summer session between university terms I used to drive a tractor for the city cutting ditches and fields. It was a great break from studying. There were times at Manitoba Hydro when I would be at my cubicle (window cubicle) where I would wish I was working outside in the sun and fresh air, so I can understand going from office work with the BS politics and <rude word> bosses to an outside job.