I am looking into whether there is a way to setup Drupal so that user accounts can be created without email addresses. My questions are:

1. Has someone already done this? How?
2. What method would be most applicable/best practice? A patch? A module?
3. Is this even doable? Are there too many modules that depend on e-mail address being present?

The application: I am building a website for a very large church. One of the requirements is that they would like the website to be the central location for a people directory. However, a good portion of the church, is technologically illeterate and don't have email addresses. Thus, it follows that we need to create user accounts without email addresses.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Chris

Comments

Darrell’s picture

Not sure why you would need a user account for someone that doesn't have access to the web unless it is just to build a database.
If that is the reason, you could enter the name (John Smith) then enter the E mail as John@Smith and the password as John Smith.
Drupal will accept this and then if at a later date John Smith gets access to the web he could log in and change his info.

VM’s picture

you could also. give the users who don't have email accounts an email account within the domain name.
johndoe@yoursite.com

z.stolar’s picture

Or just a "noemail-[micro-timestamp]@noemail.com" unique automatic email address.
If you generate the [micro-timestamp] with php's function microtime, you guarantee a 99.99999999% probability of no two identical emails.

======================
Z.Stolar
linnovate.net - community content infrastructures

cghobbs’s picture

Thanks for your feedback. I've definately considered the fake email address solutions. The problem with that is if they were a part of an organic group (i.e. care group or ministry) then there would be hundreds of bounce backs.

I guess your questions have helped me figure out more what I am looking for. I am looking for a way for church staff to administer and manage one consolidated contact list and add those contacts to group. In an ideal world where everyone has one email address this would be easy using organic groups. However in a church there tends to be a good portion of older people who are just not tech savvy and also children who aren't allowed to have email addresses. But they belong to these groups.

It would be great if there were to different kinds of users (ones with email addresses and ones without). The ones with email addresses would function just as normal users. The ones without email addresses would not be able to do anything on site (obviously), but they could be acted upon by site admins (i.e. organized into groups, included in contact lists, etc.)

Does that help you to understand what I am trying to achieve.

Anonymous’s picture

I'm trying to create accounts, without an email. I tried the
noemail-[micro-timestamp]@noemail.com

but got this:

"The e-mail address noemail-[micro-timestamp]@noemail.com is not valid."

Did I misunderstand the directions?

===
Doug Ouverson
hear | see | say | do | teach

Darrell’s picture

I don't think that brackets [] are allowed in the email name.

z.stolar’s picture

Of course,

noemail-[micro-timestamp]@noemail.com => Change [micro-timestamp] with an actual microtime output (check out the microtime php function)

======================
Z.Stolar
linnovate.net - community content infrastructures

foursticks’s picture

I don't think Drupal will validate "John@Smith" . "John@Smith.com" will, just make sure to configure it so it doesn't send an email, as discussed later in this thread.

glendac’s picture

Check out cPanel at http://drupal.org/node/62508.

cghobbs’s picture

Thanks, that looks like a very handy module. Unfortunately I am using Plesk not cPanel. Maybe one day (but probably not I could develop a module for Plesk). Thanks!

rivena’s picture

I don't know that there are modules that require email, but I would think it through. If you are going to just open it to everyone, how will you prevent spam? If it's going to be invitation only, you have to have sign up sheets, people will lose it, whatcha going to do when you have seven John Smiths, etc.

Anisa.

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cghobbs’s picture

This won't be open to just anyone. The Church has a large database of people (thousands) some with email addresses some without. They already manage this database and they do it all manually now anyways. Through contact cards and by phone (so this certainly would be creating more work for them).

*see some of my comments above and below to get a better idea of what I am asking.

bytemybits’s picture

Maybe we are missing the point. Maybe he's trying to create a contact list, not a user base. If it's a contact list like Outlook Contacts or any other contact manager you're shooting for, off the top of my head I would say CCK / Views would be one way to go. Maybe someone else knows a module that's more to the point. The only problem I have with CCK in this instance is it's inflexible "Title" requirement, but that can be renamed to surname or something.

cghobbs’s picture

Thanks for all the comments. I certainly appreciate the the feedback. The reason I would like to do this is because the church requires a consolidated contact list, but I want that contact list to be consolidated with the user list. This allows people who are tech savvy to update their own profiles. It also allows them to be part of organic groups. The tool will be used as a community website but also as an administration tool for the website.

As with any multi-age group their are a good number of older people who are not tech savvy but would also want them to be included in organic group lists to show who is a part of each group (care groups and ministries).

Does that make sense?

Darrell’s picture

You can handle this under Administer/Access control/ Roles.
Set your rules to not Email those in the fake Email list. If they add an Email address you just change their role.

wickwood’s picture

As I understand it nomail.invalid is a valid TLD, so if you need to create users with bogus email addresses this will work.

I did this with a site for a cycling group. We then sync the database with MailChimp and use Rules to filter out the nomail.invalid addresses so they do not get synced to MailChimp.

Thanks mlncn for the link to https://www.drupal.org/project/optional_mail as I'm working on another project myself where I need to do this again.

Thank You Drupal Community for all the help you continue to give me, especially when I need it most!