Approving Users Before Access Is Enabled

Problem

“Will DAP allow me to manually approve members before their new accounts are activated? The process should be…
a) new user signs up, DAP prompts that the account is pending approval
b) Admin approves the account manually and email is sent to new member with their password and login details”

Solution

Yes, this can be achieved by enabling the “Double Optin” for a product.

So, normally, when a DAP Product is made “Double Optin” by entering the double-optin subject and email text on the “Email Notifications” tab of the product, and a user signs up for this product (whether as a free sign up or as a paid purchase or Admin-add), DAP will send them the content of this double-optin email first.

And usually, the body of this email would contain the %%ACTIVATION_LINK%% merge tag, which would become the confirmation link that the user has to click on first, before their product access status becomes “Active” (from “Inactive”). And as soon as the user clicks on the confirmation link, their product status becomes active, and then the “Welcome Email” is sent out right away, and now the user can log in and start accessing the content that is protected as part of that product.

Using Double-Optin To Force Approval

If you make the DAP product as double-optin, and remove the merge-tag %%ACTIVATION_LINK%% from the email body, what happens is that the user/member will get the email, but there’s really no activation link (confirmation link) in the email for them to self-activate their account. So the email would just say something like…

“Thank you for your purchase/signup. Your account needs to be activated by us. So appreciate your patience while we do so”.

Now, their account remains at “Inactive” status. And only you, the DAP Admin, can activate it.

By now, you would’ve gotten the admin notification email for this person’s signup. So you know their email id. If not, you can just go to DAP > Users > Manage and you’ll see all inactive users.

You would then click on “Modify” to activate product access. And if the user status is also “Inactive”, then you would edit the user info, and change their status to “Active” (from “Unconfirmed”).

And then make sure you’ve added an autoresponder email (that contains the user’s email and password – insert mergecodes %%EMAIL_ID%% and %%PASSWORD%% into the email) to go out on Day #2 for that product.

And assuming you will be approving this new user at some point within the first 2 days, the autoresponder email for day #2 will get triggered within the hour as soon as you activate their account, and the user will get their welcome email.

Or you can send them the password in the double-optin email itself, but tell them that they won’t be able to log in just yet until their account is activated. It’s all up to you – DAP is as flexible as you need it to be.

So that’s how you would use the Double-Optin feature to indirectly force an “Approval” process.