For a school website, I need to find a way to allow students to register and use drupal without supplying an email address (most don't have one, and some others do not want to supply theirs). I need to authenticate them solely with name and password.

The catch is, we are a small private school, not supported by any education district computer network, and therefore have a plain, business account, shared cpanel-11 webhost, with no shell access.
That means I can't run any ident server on it: ldap, cosign, openID, etc

Do any authentification experts here know if this module can help me, or have any other suggestions as to how our students to use drupal without having an email address?

FYI, I tried the localemail module, but it doesn't install and the project looks dead.

Thanks.

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Paul Natsuo Kishimoto’s picture

Paul Natsuo Kishimoto commented
Assigned: Unassigned » Paul Natsuo Kishimoto
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

No, I don't think webserver_auth can help you in this case. It may work if you can password-protect directories using .htaccess and .htpasswd (either FTP-uploaded, or through CPanel). I gave some instructions on how to do this in response to #306542: Authenticate users against an .httpasswd file?.

If not, there are a few things you can try:

One, you can create all of the accounts using a garbage e-mail address; "junk1234567890@gmail.com" or similar. Keep access to that account and use it for all users. If the school is small, students can ask an administrator for new passwords (when they forget old ones), and that can be done manually with the student present.

In order to do this, you need to get Drupal to accept the same e-mail address for multiple accounts. There is some discussion of how to do this here: http://drupal.org/node/15578. Alternately you could use "drupal-user-123@example.com", where example.com is your domain. Then, use CPanel to create e-mail redirects for all of those e-mail addresses into a single "junk" account as described above.

http://drupal.org/node/99403 also seems to be relevant. In general, searching the Drupal website or "drupal blah blah" using Google will turn up other people attempting similar things—the benefits of a large user base.

I am marking this support request as "closed" because any further questions you have will either (a) be more relevant to #306542: Authenticate users against an .httpasswd file? or (b) better asked in the forums, because they will not involve webserver_auth. Good luck!