I'm developing a forum/community board and I want to avoid registration forms. So I decided to make user registration almost implicit.
What I mean is, if an unregistered user is about to do something that requires an account (e.g. creating a thread, responding to one, sending a PM to someone else, etc.), just add an email
field and a CAPTCHA
in whatever the form is.
Then, when the form with the email
field and the CAPTCHA
is submitted, along with the main information of the form (the thread text
, response text
, message content
, respectively), the user's account is automatically created. The section My account
become available, etc. And the an email is sent to the email they provided along with a randomized password (their current password).
But I have a few questions about this approach:
- What if the user makes a mistake when writing his/her email?
- Is it okay to add a time limit for validating the account (like 24 hours or so)? And should the account be deleted completely if this time limit is exceeded?
And most importantly, how can I make it clear for users that this is only for registration, and if they already have an account they should just sign in?