Improve the registration sequence

• Usability

I have created a new site, and asked some people to try and register on it, and tell me anything that confused them.

And it seems there is something about the registration sequence of Tiki that can be confusing to end users.

In Tiki, the sequence (as I have configured it) looks like this:

A) User registers
B) Admin receives a notification
C) Admin approves
D) User receives a notification asking for him to confirm his email. He clicks on a link to validate that he controls that email.

Because I am the sole admin and am not at my computer all the time (I do sleep 8h a day ;-)), there can be sometimes a couple of hours between A) and D). This means that for many hours, the user no “persistent” confirmation that his registration request has been noted. To be sure, when you register, Tiki prints a message on the screen that says you will receive an email notification and that this can take several hours. But it doesn’t send you an email until the Admin has approved the account. So, for say, 12 hours, you are wondering what’s going on, and you don’t have anything anymore that tells you it’s being processed (because the Tiki message is now gone from your browser). It’s easy for people to start wondering “Did this REALLY work? Did I REALLY see that message from the server saying that I would receive an email message?”. This is what happend to my test user.

In most systems I have worked with, the sequence is more like this:

1) User registers
2) User immediately receives a notification asking him to confirm his email. User clicks on a link to validate that he controls that email.
3) Admin receives a notification that someone with a valid email has requested a registration
4) Admin approves
5) User receives a note that his account has been approved

With this sequence, even if the admin takes a long time to approve the request, during that time, the user has a PERSISTENT acknowledgement in his email inbox.

Another advantage of the later sequence is that we don’t bug the Admin until we know that the email address is valid. With the current approach, if a spammer tries to register with an email that doesn’t exist, the Admin will be asked to approve the account anyway, and we will end up with an account that exists, but was never validated.

Do people agree with this analysis? And if so, do we know how easy or hard it would be to change the order so that step D) happens right after A) instead.

This bug has been demonstrated on show2.tiki.org

Please demonstrate your bug on show2.tiki.org