If you’ve ever been responsible for supporting an installation of WordPress Multisite with open registration, you know that the activation process can be a significant source of headaches. Sometimes activation emails get caught by spam filters. Sometimes they are overlooked and deleted by unwitting users. And, to complicate matters, WP’s safeguards prevent folks from re-registering with the same username or email address. This can result in a lot of support requests that are not particularly easy to handle. Aside from reaching manually into the database for an activation key, there’s not much the admin can do to help the would-be member of the site.

My new WordPress plugin Unconfirmed eases this problem a bit, by providing WPMS admins with a new set of tools for managing unactivated registrations. (By naming it “Unconfirmed”, I fully expect that the plugin will join some great movies and books in the pantheon of Important Cultural Objects.) Unconfirmed adds a new panel to your Network Admin Dashboard (under the Users menu). When you visit the Unconfirmed panel, it gives you a list of all pending registrations on your system. The list is easily sortable by registration date, username, email address, and activation key. For each unactivated registration, there are two actions that the admin can perform. “Resend Activation Email” does exactly what it says: it sends an exact duplicate of the original activation email, as created by the WordPress core activation notification functions. “Activate” allows admins to activate a pending registration manually, which will trigger the activation success email to the user.

At the moment, Unconfirmed is compatible with WordPress Multisite (aka Network mode) only. In the future, I may expand the plugin to work with non-MS installations of WP. Unconfirmed works with BuddyPress, too. The plugin was developed for use on the CUNY Academic Commons.

Download Unconfirmed from the wordpress.org repo or follow its development on Github.