User creation notification

[Andro (Andrew Bernard)]

Is there any way for the admin to get an email notification on signup of a new user?

[simon]

If you enable the must approve users site setting, moderators will get a notification for all new signups. The limitation with that approach is that users will not be able to login to the forum until they have been approved by a staff member.

Another approach would be to use the User Event webhook to trigger an email for all new signups. You could use a service like Zapier to listen for the webhook.

[Andro (Andrew Bernard)]

Thank you. It is the latter I desire. Where can one find out about event webhooks and Zapier?

[simon]

@Andro

Where can one find out about event webhooks and Zapier?

Have a look at this topic:

Trigger a Zapier task with Discourse Webhooks

[image] Want to use Discourse Webhooks to trigger a task via Zapier? Let’s get started! Zapier requires a trigger and an action. In this howto the trigger will be a Discourse Webhook and the action will be to send an email. Send an Email on any User event We will now set up a Zap to send email on any user event (i.e when a user is created, approved or updated). To trigger on a specific user event, see Trigger on a specific user event below. Create a Discourse Webhook Create a new Disco…

One possible issue with using the User Event webhook is that it fires for more events than user creation. For example, it is sent every time a user logs into the site. You will need to filter it on Zapier by checking to see if the X-Discourse-Event header has its value set to user_created. The “Trigger on a specific user event” section of the topic I linked to shows how to do that. The problem I’m seeing with doing this on Zapier is that it could get quite expensive processing User Event webhooks for events that you are not interested in. A webhook that only fires when a user is created or updated could be useful.

[j127]

@simon

The problem I’m seeing with doing this on Zapier is that it could get quite expensive processing User Event webhooks for events that you are not interested in.

A free alternative for listening to the webhooks might be a cloud function. I think you can get 2 million free function executions per month on Firebase. Or 125,000/month on Netlify (uses AWS Lambda).

For the emails, if you already use Mailchimp, then I think the Mandrill add-on might still offer 20,000 free transactional emails per month Mailgun isn’t free any more, but probably wouldn’t be too expensive. Amazon SES would be even cheaper.

Edit: Mandrill isn’t free at all, so Mailgun or SES might be the cheapest options. It looks like Mailgun currently is $0.80 per 1,000 emails and SES is $0.10 per 1,000 emails.