Configuring User Registration

You can configure the application so that people can sign up on their own, creating user accounts by entering information that you ask for. Use the Registration Settings page to enable user-created accounts and to set up how account creation works.

Admin Console: People > Settings > Registration Settings

Note: People using the community must set their browsers to enable cookies. The application doesn't encode session IDs in URLs.

New User Account Settings

Setting	Description
Password Strength	You can specify how strong you want user passwords to be. The password strength indicator will help the person registering create a password that's strong enough to qualify.
Human Input Validation	Enable this to require that a person registering be prompted with a captcha image. The image displays text (distorted to prevent spam registration) that the person must enter in order to continue with registration. This is a way to discourage registration by other computers simply for access to community in order to send spam messages. Human input validation generally isn't needed for internal communities that aren't accessible to the public.
Email Validation	Enable this to have the application send an email to the person registering at the address they provided (you can edit the contents of the template used for the email). By default the email includes a link that the person must use to prove that the email address they gave is a valid one. This is another means to discourage false registration.
Terms & Conditions	If you've authored a "terms and conditions" page that new users must accept, enable the feature here and include a URL to your page.
Welcome Email	Enable this to have the application send the new user an email when they've finished registering. You can edit the template for emails like this.
Registration Moderation	If you enable moderation for membership requests, new registration requests will appear on administrators' Pending Approvals profile tab. To get to the tab, in the end user UI click Your Stuff > Items Awaiting Approval. (If you have a user administrator, that person will approve or decline requests; otherwise, the system administrator will get those requests.)
Registration Fields	You can define the fields that are displayed to prompt a user for information while they're registering. The fields you can choose from here are based on the fields defined for user profiles. For more on profile fields, see Defining User Profile Templates

Allowing User-Created Accounts

Enable or disable user-created accounts. Unless you enable the feature, the New Account Settings section of the Registration Settings page is unavailable for editing.

When user-created accounts are enabled, people will be able to sign up for a new account from the login page. The registration process takes them through a brief set of screens through which they add the information you've requested with the console's Registration Settings page.

Note: Before they've finished, the person registering is prompted to invite others to join the community. This is a great way to grow your community, particularly if it's accessible to the public. But if you want to turn the invitation feature off across the entire community, you can do so by setting the invitations.system.enabled system property to false. For more information about system properties, see Fine Tuning with System Properties.

User Registration Wizard

To register for an account with the community, people use the wizard described here.

The first registration step is to create an account by entering values in the fields you specified in the admin console. Notice that the password strength indicator prompts the person to create a strong password. The indicator displays a check mark for each component of a strong password that the person has already included while typing.

The next step is for the person to put together the basics of their first profile. Good, complete profiles help to build a strong community, but the person can leave these fields unedited for now if they want to.

To configure user profiles, use the Profile and Homepage admin console page. For more on profiles, see Defining User Profile Templates

The person registering get to preview their profile and revise it or move on.

They can invite other people to join if they like, or they can just skip this step. The people they invite receive an email with a link through which they can reach the community and register.

The last step of registration is simply a link into the community.

The new member's home page inviting, displaying messages that prompt them to start in right away.