Re: I need to be notified when people register.

On Monday, Jan 19th 2009 at 09:02 -0000, quoth John L:

=>> I just found to my horror that I have hundreds of people who registered but
=>> never figured out how to subscribe.
=>
=>That's very peculiar.  You might want to try and figure out why people are
=>registering, rather than subscribing to lists.  None of my users even know how
=>to register other than as a side-effect of subscribing to something.
=>
=>R's,
=>John

It's no mystery. I know exactly why they're doing it. They go to the web 
user interface and they are presented with the brown bar on the top that 
says "Sign In". The problem is that when some people click that, they are 
given the option of giving their email address and password which does not 
yet exist, or they can register as a new user. Unfortunately, most of the 
people I deal with are not technical. So, a lot of them request to be 
registered. Only a subset of those succeed at confirming the generated 
request, but once they do it, they think they're done, they never get onto 
the list(s) that they intended to be on and it's all over.

I now get notified when a register command succeeds, but my take is that 
when someone punches the "Sign In" button, they should not be allowed to 
register. In fact, I'm not clear on why register is in any way a good 
thing to have at all. If you subscribe to a list then you're automatically 
registered. And if you do register it doesn't make the job of subscribing 
any easier.

If I had my druthers, the "Sign In" button should only allow you to sign 
in and have a message saying that if you are new and want to subscribe to 
something, that you should use your Back button and look for the "Search 
for a mailinglist" section.

The bigger mystery is why more people have not noticed that this is a 
problem.

BTW, sometimes it's important to remind people that I am smiling while I 
write this. There's no intent at being snarky.

-- 
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have  .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net