I had a topic about this once before, but I can’t find it. This is the second time this has happened in the last while, so I’m bringing it up again.
Synopsis: If a new admin user visits the Wizard and creates their admin account but their outgoing email is broken, there is little way for them to ever get logged in.
Steps to reproduce: Visit wizard, set up account and have validation email sent, but have that email not be delivered (e.g., because they hadn’t finished configuring Mailgun).
If you re-visit the site, the Wizard appears because they never validated the account. It would seem like they could try again to use the wizard to send the validation email, but you can’t, it does nothing, and provides not hint that it’s not doing what you think.
The only way to recover is to guess at some url (otherwise, you get only the wizard page), find your way to the login dialog, and then do the “forgot password” sequence.
The likelihood of having your email configuration broken when you first visit the site is fairly high, so it’s not hard to get caught in this trap.
I haven’t noticed this until recently, so I think that the wizard used to send multiple attempts. I’m installing on stable now to see if it’s my imagination.
Edit: I think that Discourse does not send the activation email on subsequent create-the-admin-account, but the “resend activation email” button is there, so people should know to click that.
Doesn’t happen on our hosting because email is pre-configured
What can I say? Email is the hardest problem in computer science. I guess you could put some text in there “by the way, stop f**king up your email config?”
That’s exactly what happened. The first activation email will either by sent at a later time when Sidekiq tries again or it won’t be sent at all if it already tried too often. Clicking the “Resend” button would have been enough, but I guess that’s too much to ask for.
I changed it so that the activation email is sent again when the admin re-registers. No need for clicking a button anymore.
I think that what’s confusing is that it says “We sent an activation. . .” which implies that it got sent just before that message was displayed, when really, it means “We sent an activation . . . when you tried before and your mail system was broken, so you really need to click the resend button RIGHT NOW.”
