I activated a user but they don't get an email

1. User signs up.  I get a "new user joined" email and they get an email "Email Confirmation Request"

2. They click the link in the email to confirm.  Their activity on the site is still limited and they do not yet show up as members.

3. I get an email that they did click the link.

4. I go to admin and "Activate" their profile.  They now show up as members on the front end and can perform actions as set for their membership level.

PROBLEM: They do not get an email letting them know that their account has been activated.  How will they know? I know that they can log in and see that their membership is active now, if they click on "Account" ("Profile Status: Active") but why don't they get an email?

I tried to send them a message from their profile but, since we are both "standard" members (I just learned that Admin is a "standard" member) and I have it set that standard members cannot send messages, I (as Admin) get the message: "YOUR MEMBERSHIP LEVEL DOESN'T ALLOW YOU TO SEND MESSAGES"

Arrrghhh.

I'm not going through settings again - I have it set up the way I want it.  I don't want "auto activate."

For now I guess I will just have to copy their email address and send them a manual email.

I don't manually activate.  However, I know that members get an email from the auto-activate setup on my system because I was testing the login mechanism one day.  I might test the manual activation to see if it activation emails do work.

Yes, memberships are separate; you will need to create a membership level; you can set it as not purchasable, that will give you more actions and assign that membership level to your account.

I see.. so create a membership level so that they are not "standard" members and then for myself (standard) allow sending messages.

Hopefully there is then a way to make that new level the default level for new members.  I won't have time today to look into this but I will.

If you do test please let me know if you get a "your account has been activated" email in addition to the "email confirmation request" email.  I didn't even check to see if there's an email template for that, I will check tomorrow.

Thanks.

 No, actually I meant the reverse of that.

When a user joins they either get the promotional (if it is enabled) or they get the standard.  What you want to do is to create a non purchasable membership level for you as admin to use.  Then you assign that membership to you so you can send out emails and other actions.  Your members won't see that membership in the list because it is not purchasable by them but it is still active.

They should get a email when you activate their account.

My question is, did you play with the EmailNotify field in the field builders? If that was deleted or default changed to 0 then no emails will be sent to the member.

Check the Profiles table in the database and verify your members have that field set to 1

Great stuff to go on, thank you to both of you.

I do believe I removed the "email notify" on day one because I wasn't sure what it was for (I believe I was thinking newsletter-type notifications).  I will check that first, that is where the problem must be.

Dangit I wish I had time today to play in Admin but I promised myself no playing around today until meeting freelance work commitments.  Good motivation to work fast today though haha.  So I guess I should stay off of the forums here and try to remain focused lol.

If the activate email uses that, then you want to make sure that the EmailNotify field is not included on the join form; leave it on the profile edit form.  I would think one would want the system set up so that the activate email for new accounts is not controlled by that field.  So the confirmation email is not controlled by that field but the account activation email is?

Yes, it controls the newsletter as well; which is why I changed the code and included a separate one for the newsletter so that members could opt out of email notifications from the site but still opt in for the newsletter.

UGHH OK then well the whole thing just keeps getting more and more complicated.  I'm so glad I have a week left before launching.  It's a soft launch so I have no worries but I DO need to get this dang original step sorted out at least.

Which mod did you use GG?

I did not use a mod, I edited the code directly to have the newsletter bits and pieces checking the status of a different field in the profile table that I added using the profile fields builder.

There are several newsletter replacement modules in the market and I think they are set up so that users can opt in and out with a setting in their account page or profile edit page.

After adding "email notify" to the join form, the member now does get an email notification that their account/profile has been activated.

My only concern now is if they choose to uncheck the box when joining.  I see that the form table id's are #join_form_table and #edit_form_table so I will hide the one on the join form via css.

Thanks for your help all :)

no need to hide using css - just drag the email notify block to inactive area in Admin-Builders-ProfileFields-Join. This will hide it on the join form.

Wouldn't this be considered a bug?  The activate emails should not check for the EmailNotify.

I agree that the email activation should not be directly related to the email notify field - but the question to determine if it is a bug is: did the developers of dolphin design it that way. If so, then, yes, it should be changed, but may not be considered a bug if that was the design of it. Cause technically the activation email is a notification (notification that your account is active). But it definitely should be separated.

When I say bug, I include both logic bugs as well as coding bugs.  If an algorithm is flawed; such as a user being able to turn off getting the proper activation notices, then I consider that a bug; a logic bug.

 I had removed it from both - so you're saying that having it in the edit form but not in the join form will do the trick?

I'm going to go through the whole process again to test.

Whether it's a bug or not it doesn't make much sense.  The two are to do with joining the site rather than activity-related, ongoing notifications.

This EmailNotify thing may be why a member did not get a notice about her membership expiring.  Oh well.

The t_Activation template is normally a template that is forced to be sent. Which means the emailnotify field is suppose to be ignored in this case.

So if it is not, then there is a bug somewhere.

I plan i doing a mod at some point that will allow a site admin to set each individual template to override that setting or not.