Geeklog Forums

This guy signed up for my geeklog site and says he never got the activation email. I had him look in his junk email box and he claims it's not there. Of course he's the first person out of 180 people this has happened to... Anyway, it's been a couple months now and that email is definitely long gone now. How can I get him going on the site properly? I put his status to active, but he still can't login and access certain features.

Thanks a lot

B

Since the user is set to "active", he could request a new password, using the "Forgot password" link.

Failing that, you as the Admin could simply set a new password for them.

bye, Dirk

Oh, I didn't know that. Where do I set that up for him? Version 1.4.1 by the way...

**EDIT** I found it, never noticed that before. So I typed in the password twice and it still says next to his name "Awaiting Registration." Is there a way to get rid of that or is it just permanent since he never registered himself and I had to do it for him?

Thanks Dirk!

"Awaiting Activation" (not "Registration" means that the user hasn't logged in yet. I'm pretty sure that you should be able to set it to "Active", but there were some subtle changes over the last couple of releases and I may have that wrong.

Anyway, as long as it doesn't read "Banned", they should be able to log in with the password you set for them.

bye, Dirk

Since someone has raised an issue that sounds related to one I've had, I've noticed that a bunch of users to my site that use Yahoo have registered but never logged in. They could be spambots of course. But I tried creating a new user account using a yahoo.com.au email address, got the success message, and waited for the password email to be sent.

It didn't turn up. Not in junk nor spam nor Inbox. I tried again, registering my partner with her email address, also Yahoo. Again nothing.

I tried a live.com.au email account and a local ISP account. The former turned up in the spam folder. For the latter it turned up in the Inbox fine.

Then 3 days later, the registration email for my partner turned up in her Yahoo account. The original Yahoo attempt still hasn't turned up after 4 days.

So whether they don't like my site or what I don't know. I don't expect any breakthrough answers here, just commenting and I guess a warning to others. I assume it's more about Yahoo's opinion of my site not anything Geeklog specific.

I searched our database and we have 100 Yahoo email users, 50 of whom have never logged in. I've emailed them all letting them know of the problem.

I have tried pursuing it with Yahoo. After the auto response I've reached the kind of human stage, but asking generic questions asking for error messages that obviously I don't have and don't relate to my problem.

Would my site have the outgoing password email saved in an account somewhere?

That was an interesting experiment, thanks. It's possible that Yahoo has a spam filter that checks for reoccuring patterns and that the standard welcome email triggers that (although that wouldn't explain the 3-day delay for that one email). You could try using a different text for the email.



No, not in clear text.

bye, Dirk

I didn't know you could do that. Definitely something to look into. I'll post back if I get any joy from Yahoo.

i have had similar problems in the past and some activation notices never appeared in the inbox of the members. So I would send out a separate email from my Outlook letting each know that if they do not receive the activation email within 24 hours, please contact me at xxxxxx@xxx.com They are also instructed to ad the webmaster's email address to their Safe Sender's list during the registration process and in the email I send out as a backup.

After that point, if I don't see where the user has logged in, another activation notice is sent out. If they don't respond to my manual email, I delete them from the member directory. If they do respond via email, I would setup a temporary password, manually activate the account, send the email with a 24 hour expiration.

Lately I have been seeing a lot of gmail, yahoo and other spamming accounts trying to access the program. The Captcha will allow one to go through every once in a while, which is odd.

I have a separate geek log site without captcha and it is being tortured to death by spammers.

It may also be the case that the IP of your shared webspace has been banned and that yahoo uses a list with banned IPs to delete emails from there supposed to be spam.

You may check if you find yourself here and talk to your hoster to get delisted:
http://whatismyipaddress.com/staticpages/index.php/is-my-ip-address-blacklisted

Looks like my site isn't blocked by only 1 of those, but that 1 also blocked my ISP which is completely different, so presumably a hypersensitive list.

Looks like I should use some of the above methods to be more thorough when new people register.

I explained to Yahoo that I created several accounts on Yahoo and other sites and created test users, and in all cases the registration email went through from my site within minutes, except for Yahoo accounts. It turns out that after 3 to 6 days the emails turn up in the spam folder - a very good way to have a user annoyed, give up or forget they ever tried to register - it seems no coincidence that our biggest list of users who never logged in are Yahoo users.

After cycling around in circles with the Yahoo tech, with the same questions multiple times despite my answers, the final response was:



I don't really understand how GL sends email, so I give up at this point. And probably go for a customised message warning Yahoo users of the delay and to look in spam.

There are 2 ways to send emails from GL. One method is SMTP tha tmeans similar settings like doing it from outlook / thunderbird.

Did I understand correctly that you found your IP on the blacklist ? Did you ask Yahoo if they block emails from that specific IP or how they handle it? Did you ask your hoster what to do?

I told Yahoo the IP address and their next email asked for it again.

Out of many sites there was just 1 that blacklisted.

I got your email thanks and will follow it up and let people know if there is any progress.