I'm looking to add the following functionality to my website:

1) User signs up and lists the school(s) he or she attended
2) These schools are verified somehow (perhaps an email is sent to each of the email domains and the user can verify)
3) The user's profile is updated to show that his or her identity has been verified

I've been looking for a module to replicate some of the Facebook functionality that is very similar to what I just described. I don't want to restrict sign-ups to only .edu email holders - I just want to find some intelligent way to verify a user's college identity as an optional feature.

Does such a module exist or does anyone have suggestions on how to proceed? I've looked around the site for a while but can't find much related content.

Comments

webchick’s picture

webchick
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Primary language English
Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
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Category: feature » support
Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

Are you wanting to verify the email host against a known set of hosts? Or are you wanting the user to give an email address of the school administrator or some other officer to verify against? The logintoboggan module will allow a role to be assigned that can be configured and appropriately named that will give the user limited access to the site while verification is in process. You can then filter on that role to modify the user to another role that gives full authenticated rights.

youplatform’s picture

youplatform commented

Ideally I am looking for the first option you described - to verify against a known set of hosts. For now, I'd be happy with a solution that simply verifies that the user has an email address that contains the school he or she added to their profile page. For example, if if the school is Vassar then I'd be happy to have a solution that:

-1) Sends an email to the address the user stated was his or her school address
-2) Has the user follow a link ("Click here to verify your address", or something of that nature)
-3) Updates the user's status to "Verified" if the domain includes "Vassar" or any type of subset (VassarAlumni.org should work, for example)

In short - I'm looking for a solution that would be as close as possible to that which Facebook currently uses. If there is nothing like this out there, I guess I'd settle with Logintoboggan (thanks for mentioning this) for now while I write something myself or hire someone to help.

Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

First let me state that I don't Facebook so your reference is just too vague for me. However, how do you plan to obtain the data for the list of schools. Building a table for that should be easy enough if you have the data. I don't know if a module exists already but using hook_user and hook_form_alter you should be able to create a module to do what you want.

To control the verified piece you can create roles that the initial registration is assigned to and then once the verification happens the user is set to a role with more rights. The initial registration role would contain the same rights as the anonymous role and could even be the authenticated user role.

HTH

youplatform’s picture

youplatform commented

Thank you very much, Ernie. I do not have the data of 'cleared' school domains at this point, which I believe is the heart of the problem. If I had the data, I could - as you suggested - put together the appropriate tables and modules to make the verification process happen. For now, I think I'll concentrate my attention on trying to find this data somewhere and then work on the coding logistics behind the process. If you do become aware of some contributed module that might help solve this problem, I would be extremely interested in hearing.

Thank you for the time and insights you've provided - this definitely helped me get started and (for now) convinced me that there aren't many pre-built modules out there to work with.

ainigma32’s picture

ainigma32 commented
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Fixed

Answer provided so setting to fixed.

- Arie

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.