Registration for non-Facebook Users

[shortmort37 (Dan Morton)]

I want to enable must_approve_users to qualify them for membership - but at the same time, I want Facebook members to auto-qualify (typically, because of a link to my Discourse site that I post on Facebook). I understand that must_approve_users applies globally. Is there a plug-in that will permit me to achieve this?

Thanks
Dan

[chapoi]

Hello,

There is currently no plugin doing this afaik. It used to be a possible workaround to share an invite link that would overrule the need for approval, but the security around that has been tightened, see Why do I need to still approve users that I have invited?

Might be worth putting your vote towards the feature request to change that:

Allow users invited by staff to skip approval

When a new user joins via an invite link, I’m finding that I also need to approve the user at the moment. This defeats the whole purpose of an invitation; I may as well just send them the link to the forum. I’ve tried this for a variety of situations (new link, old link, single person, multiple) on more than one instance, and it is the same. I’ve got /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=must_approve_users TRUE for these instances. It seems to be taking it a bit too literally! I wa…

Maybe take a look at the Custom Wizard Plugin and see if that can do anything.

And lastly, you could maybe have a setup with a custom user field + the Discourse Automation plugin, but that would be A) not secure because people could just lie on the user field + you’d still need to write a new script for the plugin.

[shortmort37 (Dan Morton)]

Thanks for your feedback. I’ll make two observations about the operation of my current phpBB board, which I’ve been running for 22 years:

1. As Facebook has ascended, so has activity on my board slowed to a trickle. I’m of the firm belief that I can’t fight them, so I’ll join them. To the extent that I can integrate my board with Facebook, and promote it there, I’ll generate more traffic. That’s proven to be true so far on my phpBB board, where Facebook users are provided the opportunity to register on the fly with their Facebook credentials, without approval, and without invitation.

2. Initially to make the Facebook integration work, I had to open up phpBB to registration without approval; and I was inundated with non-Facebook spam registrations. I reinstated the requirement for approval for all but Facebook (from which I did not get spammed) by further modifying the code.

I don’t believe soliciting registrations from the thousands of like-minded automotive enthusiasts on Facebook is the answer for a board like mine, but rather to make it as easy as possible for them to automatically register if they visit. But phpBB is stale, and Discourse is the way I see to move forward - with similar registration provisions. Hence my request.

I’m more of a hacker than a coder, and I’m reluctant to post my changes publicly to github - but if I can get my discourse-facebook-autoapprove plugin to work in a local git repo, I’ll be happy to share as a jumping-off point.

Thanks
Dan

[shortmort37 (Dan Morton)]

I’m more of a hacker than a coder, and I’m reluctant to post my changes publicly to github - but if I can get my discourse-facebook-autoapprove plugin to work in a local git repo, I’ll be happy to share as a jumping-off point.

I was (with the help of Claude) able to develop a single file ruby plugin that works. Once the user authorizes the share of information in Facebook - when prompted by the Discourse login to Facebook - the Discourse account is created and the user is automatically logged in. Non-Facebook users remain subject to the Must approve users setting.

Because I developed it with a local git repo, it required some changes to app.yml to reference git. I don’t want to breach etiquette, so I won’t share the details here - but will with anyone who would like to take the ball and run with it.

Thanks
Dan

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

I’m very keen to have a look at your repo and give it a whirl as we are going to be in a similar situation shortly.

What are your concerns around sharing the code? I’d certainly be keen to see if it can be modified / extended to allow other users (i.e. using Google auth, Microsoft auth, LinkedIn, etc) to skip the approval queue too.

[shortmort37 (Dan Morton)]

I have no concerns, @nathank ! Happy to share, I just didn’t want to do anything impolitic.

Should I send it to you privately for your review, as opposed to posting it here?

Thank you!
Dan

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

If you like, just send it to me in a Message (if you can easily).

Would you be happy for me to make it available on github.com (with or without attribution to you as you prefer) if it works out?

[shortmort37 (Dan Morton)]

@nathank

Would you be happy for me to make it available on github.com (with or without attribution to you as you prefer) if it works out?

That would be most excellent! Don’t care ‘bout no stinkin’ attribution Claude produced a great Markdown document, soup to nuts, that includes the plugin.rb and changes to app.yml. I’ll send that along.

Thanks for your interest and support! Is this a great product and board, or wot!

Dan