This is making sense now. What the users are doing is registering an account on WordPress, not on Discourse. This can be somewhat confusing from the user’s point of view with DiscourseConnect, but that’s probably a separate issue.
What’s happening now is that the user clicks the “Log in” button on Discourse. They are redirected to your WordPress site’s Login page. They then need to navigate from the Login page to the site’s registration page (that’s the confusing part.) After registering on the site, they should be sent an email from WordPress asking them to activate their account (this will depend on your WordPress site’s configuration.) Assuming your WordPress site has the default registration configuration, the user will then click the link in the activation email and go through the steps required for activating their WordPress account and logging into the site.
If you have the WP Discourse “Create or Sync Discourse Users on Login” option enabled:
logging into WordPress will cause a Discourse user to be automatically created. If you don’t have that option enabled on WordPress, the Discourse user won’t be created until they either click the Discourse “Log in” button again, or click a Discourse login link that you’ve added to your WordPress site.
In either case, once the Discourse user is created, a “Needs approval” review entry will be created on your Discourse site:
Your Discourse site’s staff will be notified that there’s a user waiting for approval. When a staff member approves the user, the user will be sent a “You’ve been approved” email from Discourse.
This seems like a very complicated approach for giving users access to the Discourse site. The easiest way to simplify it (from a user’s point of view) would be to disable the must approve users setting on Discourse. If you have users on your WordPress site that you don’t want to allow to access your Discourse site, it would be better to add some code to your WordPress site to prevent some users from logging into Discourse: How to prevent some WP users from being able to login to Discourse - #2 by simon.
I don’t think there’s a great use case for having the must approve users setting enabled when DiscourseConnect is enabled. From a user’s point of view it’s quite confusing.
I’d like to find a good solution to the issue I mentioned about users who don’t yet have accounts on either Discourse or WordPress clicking the Discourse “Log in” button with DiscourseConnect is enabled. Maybe Discourse could add a discourse connect signup url setting. When configured, users could be redirected to the auth provider’s signup page instead of to the auth provider’s login page. For now, the best solution is to make sure that the “registration” link is obvious on the auth provider’s login page. With the default WordPress login page, it’s not that obvious:
