hi all,
There seems to be a few people on various forums wanting slightly different flavours of disabling the email confirmation as part of the signup form.
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-21651
I've just implemented one of the those flavors and intend to clean it up and submit a patch. I was after some general feedback about it all.
The use cases / options:
1) Setup self enrol so that emails don't need to be confirmed at all. Could be that it's an intranet and we trust everyone to be nice. This seems like an small edge case but I've seen valid examples of this.
2) Same as above but email never get used at all, so there is no point collecting them. Maybe there are no forums, etc.
3) An option for 'soft confirmation'. This is where you signup and log straight in, but you confirm your email seperately, possibly much later. Until you have confirmed, you won't get any emails (to stop spaming others), in the header with your login details you'll get a gentle reminder to confirm your email, and resend the confirmation if needed. Lots of new web apps are going down this path, where you can smoohtly progress from a guest, to a user with no profile, to a user with an email, etc with very minimal break in the UX flow.
Implementation ideas:
This could be a global setting that across the board to all auth plugins that returns true for can_signup / user_signup, or it could just apply to the email self enrol plugin.
For options 1 and 2 we'd also need to be able to set the email as an option user profile field, or hide it completely.