Making the activation process a one step process rather than two

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Continuing the discussion from There was a problem sending another activation email. http: undefined - undefined:

In the process of doing this I have just noticed that people are clicking on the link in the activation email (which takes them back to the activation page on Discourse), however from looking at my Mandrill click stats, it appears that many people don’t realise they have to click a second time on the activation page itself. Therefore a number of the accounts haven’t been activated.

Would it be possible to simplify this process to make it just a one click process (i.e. a click of the link in the email to activate their account)?

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Did you for some reason re-style the button so it doesn’t look like a button anymore and thus they don’t click on it?

The two step process is important to help stop automated spam accounts.

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No, we haven’t made any changes to the button.

I’m encouraged by this:

however I am a little concerned by the numbers of people who haven’t managed to complete the activation process.

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And your version of Discourse is up-to-date?

AFAIK the button was recently restyled to look more like a button precisely to address the problem you are describing.

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Well, it wasn’t restyled – the copy was explicitly changed to say “Click Here”.

The styling ‘error’ was that @watchmanmonitor’s monitor was displaying light grey as pure white :wink:

@Mischief not sure what to tell you, spam prevention requires a browser action with timer to make sure it’s a real human being activating that account. Sorry.

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For the record, see correction above.

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Ah sorry @watchmanmonitor about this misattribution :wink: and thank you for the correction, Barry!

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yes totally up-to-date.

No problem - I can fully understand the need for the spam prevention techniques. We might though need to look at ways to increase the click through rate - maybe changes to either the email wording, or to the wording on the page to make it clearer that people need to take both actions.

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Good idea, it might be helpful to follow up directly with a few of the users this happened to. Perhaps we can improve that page in other ways based on what you hear back from those users.

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A user has just come back to me and said "when I copy and paste the link into my web I get a message which reads: ‘You cannot activate yet’

Any ideas?

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I had a quick look though the code, I couldn’t find an exact match that is output by Discourse. I might be missing something though.

However there are the following messages which seem pretty close:

not_activated: "You can't log in yet. We previously sent an activation email to you at <b>{{sentTo}}</b>. Please follow the instructions in that email to activate your account."

not_activated: "You can't log in yet. We sent an activation email to you. Please follow the instructions in the email to activate your account." 

activate_email: "<p>You're almost done! We sent an activation mail to <b>%{email}</b>. Please follow the instructions in the email to activate your account.</p><p>If it doesn't arrive, check your spam folder, or try to log in again to send another activation mail.</p>"