RobAC
Sat 1st Dec '01, 12:31pm
I'd like to make a couple suggestions for the Dev. team regarding the handling of email address changes by members.
A better system needs to be incorporated when the forums are set up to validate an email address. What's happening is that when a member changes their email address, they are automatically placed in the "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" group which I have set to have no forum allowances; the same as unregistered users.
Now, they are sent an email with the subject heading of: "Action Required to Verify Membership for $bbtitle!"
This title is too long (which in some email systems, only the "Action Required to Verify Member...." appears and does not stand out to the user. When they see this, they quickly look at it and think it's spam mail and delete it, therefore, they are never removed from the "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" group, and they can't understand why the forums show them as being logged in but when they try to do something, they receive the "You are not registered or not logged in" message.
This in turn confuses the member who leaves in disgust and may or may not opt to send me an email asking me what's up.
To try and prevent this from happening, I have edited both the emailsubject_activateaccount_change and emailsubject_activateaccount subject templates to read: "ACTION REQUIRED FOR $bbtitle!"
In this day and age of intense spam mail, I think we need to keep into consideration that users who tend to receive a lot of email (especially if they are at work and using their work email account to receive private email as well), skim quickly over the subject headings and if they do not see or recognize the email address of origin, or the subject header does not catch their attention, the email gets trashed.
Also, somehow, the Member has to be informed that if and when they change their email address in their profile, they will receive an email notification that requires them to confirm that email address if the Administrator has required that as a Forum option (which I have). Yes, if they have the vision of Superman and they took a speedreading course, they might.....just might be able to catch a glimpse of that two second message that appears after they click the submit button. It's a little slower if you're on a slow dialup connection, but if you are on broadband, forget it. The message is unreadable because it practically flashes on and off the screen.
This system, in my opinion, needs to be refined and made more user intuitive so that the administrator of the forums should not have to go and make a bunch of template changes in order to achieve this.
Remember one thing, and in no way am I trying to insult anyone's intelligence, but for software developers and programmers, and those of us that own and operate our own forums and are very familiar with the software functionality, all of this is "assumed". The one thing that we are not assuming however, is that the user is "dumb". And by "dumb", I don't mean that in an insulting manner. As developers, you need to assume that the average user of the forum software; someone who comes to a set of vBulletin forums to register and join the community knows nothing about online communities, or forum software.
A better system needs to be incorporated when the forums are set up to validate an email address. What's happening is that when a member changes their email address, they are automatically placed in the "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" group which I have set to have no forum allowances; the same as unregistered users.
Now, they are sent an email with the subject heading of: "Action Required to Verify Membership for $bbtitle!"
This title is too long (which in some email systems, only the "Action Required to Verify Member...." appears and does not stand out to the user. When they see this, they quickly look at it and think it's spam mail and delete it, therefore, they are never removed from the "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation" group, and they can't understand why the forums show them as being logged in but when they try to do something, they receive the "You are not registered or not logged in" message.
This in turn confuses the member who leaves in disgust and may or may not opt to send me an email asking me what's up.
To try and prevent this from happening, I have edited both the emailsubject_activateaccount_change and emailsubject_activateaccount subject templates to read: "ACTION REQUIRED FOR $bbtitle!"
In this day and age of intense spam mail, I think we need to keep into consideration that users who tend to receive a lot of email (especially if they are at work and using their work email account to receive private email as well), skim quickly over the subject headings and if they do not see or recognize the email address of origin, or the subject header does not catch their attention, the email gets trashed.
Also, somehow, the Member has to be informed that if and when they change their email address in their profile, they will receive an email notification that requires them to confirm that email address if the Administrator has required that as a Forum option (which I have). Yes, if they have the vision of Superman and they took a speedreading course, they might.....just might be able to catch a glimpse of that two second message that appears after they click the submit button. It's a little slower if you're on a slow dialup connection, but if you are on broadband, forget it. The message is unreadable because it practically flashes on and off the screen.
This system, in my opinion, needs to be refined and made more user intuitive so that the administrator of the forums should not have to go and make a bunch of template changes in order to achieve this.
Remember one thing, and in no way am I trying to insult anyone's intelligence, but for software developers and programmers, and those of us that own and operate our own forums and are very familiar with the software functionality, all of this is "assumed". The one thing that we are not assuming however, is that the user is "dumb". And by "dumb", I don't mean that in an insulting manner. As developers, you need to assume that the average user of the forum software; someone who comes to a set of vBulletin forums to register and join the community knows nothing about online communities, or forum software.