Hi,

I found it quite difficult to find the right rubric for this question, but I did my best.

At the moment i am facing a for me rather strange problem concerning the registrations of members to my website http://www.chartella.com

More than half of the sign ups done using the registration form are not confirmed (finished) at the moment using the link in the (confirmation) email which is sent to them.

Of course the first possibility I thought about was that those emails don't arrive and are blocked by their email servers, but after contacting my host it appeared (checking their log) that none of the sent emails were blocked, so that those emails DID arrive but that for some other reason the registrations were not completed.

I also checked the registration links itself of course and they are just fine (not broken or something) and when i sign up myself it works fine also.

Perhaps you can help me come up with some other possibilities guys?

That the reason would be a non-technical one I can hardly imagine because as far as i can see their is nothing strange or unclear about the email content (see below), unless I overlooked something.

But it has to be something because I can hardly believe that so many people would first put energy in signing up, to keep it unfinished afterwards without any reason. Actually, If I look back to my own sign up history, something like that never happend. But maybe I am just overestimating my visitors.

 

Dear [name],

Thanks for registering at Chartella.com. To complete your registration you just need to click on the link below or paste it in your browser:

http://www.chartella.com/index.php?section=profile&userid=36475683&action=complete_registration&temp_key=796b3e99cbf97b25b0cae4acac70628ee15a09c59se55e173p3dfb18aec8c089173c35e6l04576fc6138aca9c0097a417fc8740da0f628394187efa551973bbe

In case you didn't sign up at our website please ignore this message.

With kind regards,
Chartella.com

 

Of course the above code is just an example and doesn't sign up anyone.

 

I would also greatly appreciate it if you are willing to sign up yourself, if you think that might help finding the answer to my question. Of course, in case the registration succeeds you are able to unsubscribe immediately after that if you wish.

 

With kind regards,

Harald ter Haar

Edited May 26, 201412 yr by chartella

I was thinking:

 

Could it be maybe that people don't expect a confirmation email (and as a result of that don't confirm) because the messages that there has been send an email is easy overlooked at my website because everyone expect such a mesagae to appear in a new window or popup in stead of right next to the submit button in my case?

Even though your registration mail reaches the user it might end up in their spam folder. The only thing you can do about it (as far as i know) is to make sure your mail header is set correctly most importantly the From parameter.

One way of checking this is just people not bothering to complete the process is by adding an 'unsubscribe' link to the email which will take them to a page that when they click the confirm button will automatically delete the incomplete account.

 

Then set up a cron job that checks if people have completed the account setup process or not after 3 to 5 day's. If they haven't re-send the email.

 

Then in your sites security settings force a message to be displayed to anybody that has not confirmed their email address and block access to some of you best features until they do.

 

One important point is that if you don't enforce the registration process fully it is much harder to stop bots or hackers etc from registering in order to abuse your site.

Thank you Nillervision and Weedy101 for your help!

 

Weedy101:

 

Adding a unsubscribe link already to the confirmation email: Yeah, maybe a good idea. Thanks!

 

About cleaning up the unconfirmed registrations: There is already a script active that alerts members after 24 hours if they didn't confirm yet by email and after that (if they don't reply) delete their account automaticly and completely.

 

About hackers/bots: I have taken that into account and I think (at least i hope) I protected those 'half-registrations' well enough to avoid they can do any harm.

 

Nillervision:

 

Yeah, the headers, another good point!

 

I do it like this:

 

$headers  = "MIME-Version: 1.0"."\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1"."\r\n";
$headers .= "From: Chartella.com <noreply@chartella.com>"."\r\n";
$headers .= "Bcc: Chartella.com <mail@chartella.com>"."\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP/".phpversion()."\r\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: Chartella.com <noreply@chartella.com>\r\n";
$headers .= "Return-Path: Chartella.com <noreply@chartella.com>\r\n";

ini_set("SMTP", "mail.chartella.com");
ini_set("smtp_port",25);

mail($email,$subject,$content,$headers,"-f mail@chartella.com");

I hope I did well.

Edited May 26, 201412 yr by chartella

Well NOCK, what you say could be the big answer to my question why relatively so many people who sign up at my webite (more than 80%!) don't confirm their registration if a hacker or spambot really profits from doing so (do i understand that right?).

 

But if that's true, then what i don't understand:

 

How can a hacker or spambot profit from that if he can't do anything more on a website (I guess my website is well enough protected) than a mormal user can do as long as he didn't confirm the registration? What 's the benefit of that?

 

And about spambots: Can they also handle AJAX forms and perform click events?

Edited May 27, 201412 yr by chartella