Hi, I’m the “WordPress guy” on this project.
I figured it’d be worthwhile to jump in here and ask whether the upcoming changes could be manually added to the current version of the WP-Discourse plugin so we can get rid of this problem?
On the WordPress side the registration process has not changed in any way since November 2017. We use the EONet Manual User Approve plugin, which allows users to register but not login, and on manual approval by an admin, the user is then made active and issued a password they can either continue to use, or change on first login.
(I would also like to point out that the normal WordPress user system is still in use, the only change made by the EONet plugin is for the initial activation. All users that register are 100% normal WordPress users.)
I have hooked into the approval process so that a user is only created in Discourse once their account is approved, so email verification should not be an issue. If there’s a way to specify that require_activation not be turned on then that sounds like the way to solve this.