New members visibility
 

Sorry I searched and could not find an answer for this or I overlooked any posts about this.

What time does it normally take for a new member to show up in the members list and appear beside the 'our newest member is' statistic?

I have a new member who registered today and who is not showing up in either, yet I see they have registered in admincp and have sent them a pm.

I think if you have your forum set up to make them validate the account they have to do that before they show in the stats. So if the account that signed up is a bot or a spam account it will not show until they validate the link they got in that email.

Ok. What worried me is how long the person is taking to validate the link, it has been 24 hours now and they still have not validated their account as it has not shown up as being the newest member yet. Frustrating.

I am thinking of adding the advanced registration mod so anyone wanting to register has to answer a question and thinking about forgetting about e-mail validation altogether. People seem to have so much trouble with it. I probably should create a dummy account to check out how difficult/easy e-mail verification is.

What complicated this problem was the person has an e-mail account with live and I am unable to send messages to live because my IP is only a couple of months old and Microsoft has set up live so that anyone with a new IP can't send mail to live because they are wary of spammers. The whole thing is a headache at the moment, have had a few problems one after the other, worried about managing the forum if it gets any larger. I don't know how the big boards do it.

I would not worry about it. Usually when they do not validate the email they are spammers and you do not want them on there anyways. If you know for a fact that they are not a spammer then do a check but most of the time when someone signs up and then does not validate the email quickly one of two things has happened.

1. They are a spammer and you did not want them anyways or
2. The email went into their junk mail folder and they have not checked that.

The person contacted me through the forums pm system today so it is a real person. They still don't show up as the newest member. I will give it a few days before taking any action. I just didn't expect it to take so long.

Ask them if they got the email. If not then tell them to check their junk mail folder and validate the email. If they did not get it in their junk mail then there maybe a problem on your forum with the email system that needs to be addressed.