Situation
The email template at /admin/customize/email_templates/user_notifications.set_password contains a sentence that invites users to use those services to login by default, but the site settings require activation of such services.
Alternatively, you can log in using any supported online service (Google, Facebook, etc) that is associated with this validated email address.
When the administrators do not activate these services–e.g., because they do not want to use them, users of the site still receive this confusing information.
The admin quick start guide indicates ‘social logins’ as an addition, which does not in any way warn admins that users may receive invitations to use such login methods while they’re not active on the site, and thus may fail users’ and admins’ expectations.
Expectation
- A message promoting third-party services should not appear when the settings are not activated, and certainly not by default when the settings are off. (i.e. pre-seeding an email template with information relative to optional settings should not happen.)
- The system should warn the admins that such settings exist and need changes, like it is done for other options.
- The documentation should clearly indicate that these settings are linked to an email template that requires attention.
Solutions
- The Admin Quick Start Guide should indicate (and link to) the relevant email template and propose a default string to add to the template in order to promote ‘social logins’ – seriously, I’d call them asocial anyway, or even antisocial.
- Remove the sentence promoting such services from the default email templates.
- Rename ‘social logins’ to ‘social media logins’ because the former implies such services are socially beneficial, while they’re simply intermediaries to social networks.
- Rework the admin’s login settings to split settings by service, and suggest to promote active services in the relevant email templates.