Hello,

I run a registration only (must wait to be approved by moderator) google group (closed community). I recently installed your module looking for a solution for the new home for this group as a Drupal site.

I've selected:

*Allow subscription during registration
*Checked by default
*Force default

and I've also set up the group name and group email properly. However, I have not received any requests for approval via the Google Group for my "dummy-user" registration tests for approval.

Does the module have the ability to work with a "users must request an invitation and then be approved by moderator" type setup with the google group?

Thanks a bunch.

Comments

dragonwize’s picture

dragonwize commented
Title: Subscriptions not coming in? » Subsribe to moderated groups
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

I haven't used the module with a moderated group before so I set a group to moderated and tested.

Since Google Groups does not have an API that we can use, this module relies on the email (so make sure you dummy-user is using a real email address you have access to) commands to subscribe members. When I tested, I received this message from google.

"The group you attempted to subscribe to is moderated, and therefore can not be
subscribed to by email. To request a subscription to this group, please visit the following page:..."

I then tested with the subscription block as it uses a form post to google and it works. The user still have to verify their email address but when they do, they are asked for a reason to join.

I can probably place a fake form http call to google to get around that. Though I would question the utility of the feature, especially when using the forced option, on a moderated group. Because the user still has to verify their address then they are asked for a reason to join when they had no choice in the matter to begin with.

Are you interested in this feature in light of this workflow?

soccernyc’s picture

soccernyc commented
Title: Subsribe to moderated groups » Subscriptions not coming in?
Status: Closed (works as designed) » Active

Thanks for doing the testing, the development community here is so helpful, it's really great.

I really like your tool as it takes advantage of the strengths of Google Groups (which is the uber powerful mailing list - my members use that the most out of any other feature of the site) yet it works within the sophistication of Drupal. I will continue to putz around with it, because once the new Drupal site is up and running there is no reason the old Google Group will need to be private. Right? however I would still like to moderate the mailing list as I would like to keep it spam free.

I guess in order to appropriately use your tool in the most invisible way possible to my users I would have to make the group public? However, I could still have the mailing list moderated? Is that what I am understanding from your tests?

dragonwize’s picture

dragonwize commented
Title: Subscriptions not coming in? » Subsribe to moderated groups

Yes, currently to use the drupal registration feature, your group need to be public and you can still set messages to moderated if would like. If you use the subscription block provided by the module though, users can request an subscription/invite even from a private group.

Unfortunately, there is not a truly invisible way currently. Even with the current subscription method with a public subscription type the member creating a drupal account still has to verify their email by clicking a link in google's email. I do have a message displayed to the user to give them a heads up about the email though:

You will be receiving a confirmation email for our email list.

If the user does not confirm their address with google by clicking the link in the google email, then they will not be subscribed to the list. This means that you could easily have drupal account members that are not on your list. Unfortunately, google doesn't allow a direct add without confirmation except through their web interface when you are logged in and they have several restrictions on that even.

What I do currently is I take an export of user email address from my database every once in awhile and paste it into the add or invite form. Google will work out the duplicates and add the rest. That is the best google allows us to do at the moment, that is why I really haven't put more features into this module. Without an API the features are only hit & miss.

soccernyc’s picture

soccernyc commented

Hi Dragonwize,

Ok, I've tinkered around a bit as I am definately using the module for my group as it seems the most simple solution for my needs. Here are the maximum security settings in "Group Settings">"Access" that a user can set to work with the module to get the most invisible and seamless user registration.

Who can view: anyone
directory listing: do not list
who can view members : only managers
who can join: anyone
who can edit - managers
who can upload - managers
who can post - anyone, checkbox - hold messages from non-members
who can invite - managers only
message moderation - all messages are held for moderating

After I set this as the settings the user only had to click on the link once and didn't have to jump through any more hoops on the Google site itself. I will probably change the name of the Google Group to be "[drupal group name] Mailing List" this way my users wont get confused.

Thanks, so much for your help!

dragonwize’s picture

dragonwize commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.