The member acceptance process

Im having a hard time setting up the flow of accepting a new member. Im trying to stream line the whole process & set up the correct email templates.

As I currently have it, a user signs up they instantly receive the email confirmation link and a separate email saying your membership has been approved. At that point Admin is notified. Admin then goes into the member section clicks the new member & changes edit member profile from promo to standard. Then changes admin controls from approval to active.
Is this the correct way? 

User then receives another of the same email stating membership has been approved.

I do have enable promo membership selected. It would seem that I should be able to have an email that goers out stating they now have promo membership and are awaiting approval. At that point a different email goes out saying they are full member.
Is this Possible?

JWalter, It seems a bit round about way of doing memberships. First, They are not approved until you approve them so they cannot be a promotional member.Promotional membership should be a paid membership at a reduced amount for a limited time. Standard membership is always free. If you are having them pay for a promo membership then they should have access without Admin approval process. I would still require a confirmation email.

This is how I do it. Standard membership requires confirmation email and admins approval, so the confirmation email must also state that "Once you confirm your email address your account still needs to be approved by the Administrator. You will receive another email of his approval, then you will have access to the sites other features.This should happen shortly." Hopefully, if you are the only one watching the account, you have a smartphone that has access to your sites Admin panel to approve right away. Promotional is active but has access to nothing. I have four levels of custom membership that enables special features worth the additional costs.

Another way would be to give access to the site without manual Admin approval once the confirmation email is received, the approval email follows automatically. To do this you better feel real comfortable that you have stopped all bots and spammers. To do this I suggest  a program that Deanos has on the market. Dolphin Anti Spam. You could also block Hong Kong and /or China to knock out 3/4 of the spam. You would need to get with your host for directions. You could have an open ended question like What do you call dog's feet? answer: XXXX or Erase the following word from the answer box? Answer will be an empty block that had a word in it. Or/and a double page join form. First Join form, just has basic questions Name Username password and email plus some questions, then the confirmation email goes out, then they must come back and answer a few more profile questions before they can proceed without need for your approval. That's a lot to get through for all but the human spammers, that only you or deanos tool is going to catch.

Just a few ideas, hope this helps. I plan on having a splash page as the first page of the double join, unless they use a social login. And Deanos Anti Spam, because he drinks alot of coffee.

Thanks for replying.

I decided to eliminate the promo membership.
I only want to offer 1 level & it is free. I do have deanos anti spam mod because I was getting lots of spammers signing up. If not for that, I would have it auto accept members. I dont understand spammers. no one reads that crap. Anyway...

My problem seems to be that the email called "profile activation template" is not being sent. I found a thread on this with a way to fix it, but it was from  like 3 yrs ago. I can't imagine there still being this bug in the new version which im using 7.1.

Have you heard of this problem still? 

 
And you should be able to. Have you tried auto approving members since installing my anti spam? Especially with the latest version which now has bot detection. Spam should be down to practically nothing.

Ill have to test that out. but first I must figure out why my systems is so jacked up.

Right now Im sending 2 email confirmation links at the same time, and no profile change message.

That msg is where I tell the new member how to use the site & what its about so it is crucial to receive it.

I was thinking that maybe something happened when I edited the msg html, but I cant think that would effect it this way.

any ideas