[CWB] Retaining sign-up requirement WITHOUT confirmation e-mail

[Hardie, Andrew]

Hi Scott, Qu Min, and all,

There’s a long history to this. What has happened is that, over the years, more and more of the free email services have started blocking the CQPweb signup emails. Not sending them to spam – blocking totally.

It began about 6 years ago with Yahoo if I recall correctly, but the problem really got bad a couple of years ago when Gmail started blocking them too, Gmail being the most widely used such service.

I am not entirely sure how it is that these systems are identifying the emails as spam/phishing, but that’s what’s happening.

My best guess is that is because the messages contain a hyperlink that the user is instructed to click. However, I have not had time to experiment with the effect of removing the hyperlink. If anyone does have time to play around, it is found on line 471 of useracct-lib.php.

ANYWAY. To present concerns. I have just committed an update with a new configuration variable:

## If true, the account-creation process requires entry of a verification code sent by email.
# $account_create_verify_email = true;

So if you add the following line to your config file,

$account_create_verify_email = false;

then the verification step will be switched off and account creation will always succeed immediately.

(Requires you to be running the bleeding edge of course)

Unfortunately I can’t use this myself on cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk because email addresses are used to link new accounts to institutions – which gives people access to various corpora. If I switched off verification, anybody could pretend to have an @lancaster.ac.uk email address and be given access to our non-open datasets. That can’t be risked for various IP / ethics reasons.

best

Andrew.

From: CWB <cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it> On Behalf Of Min Qu via CWB
Sent: 28 September 2025 05:54
To: ssadowsky at gmail.com; Open source development of the Corpus WorkBench <cwb at sslmit.unibo.it>
Cc: Min Qu <qumino2 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [CWB] Retaining sign-up requirement WITHOUT confirmation e-mail

[cid:image001.png at 01DC31AD.F4566C40]
Same issue here. It's mentioned on https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/ as well.



Best,
Qu Min


On Sat, Sep 27, 2025 at 11:58 PM Scott Sadowsky via CWB <cwb at sslmit.unibo.it<mailto:cwb at sslmit.unibo.it>> wrote:
Sorry to self-bump, but does anyone have a solution for this?


On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 10:12 AM Scott Sadowsky <ssadowsky at gmail.com<mailto:ssadowsky at gmail.com>> wrote:
In something like five years I have never gotten my CWB server's confirmation e-mails to be delivered to those who want to open an account more than very, very sporadically. Undoubtedly a me problem, but I haven't been able to solve it, and a lot of people just give up at that point, so I'd like to eliminate the confirmation e-mail requirement while retaining the sign-up requirement. It doesn't guarantee much, but at least it's something, and is occasionally useful for getting in touch with good-faith actors.

How do I do this, though? Unless I'm reading the manual wrong, it seems to be an all-or-nothing affair.

Thanks in advance!
Scott
_______________________________________________
CWB mailing list
CWB at sslmit.unibo.it<mailto:CWB at sslmit.unibo.it>
http://liste.sslmit.unibo.it/mailman/listinfo/cwb
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://liste.sslmit.unibo.it/pipermail/cwb/attachments/20250930/91996880/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 56471 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <http://liste.sslmit.unibo.it/pipermail/cwb/attachments/20250930/91996880/attachment-0001.png>