Will’s Similiblog

This site is intended to be world-readable, but editable only by members of a closed user community (the students & faculty of a medical college); only these users will be able to submit items, and to vote on or comment on submitted items.

As all legitimate users have email addresses issued by the institution on its own domain, the easiest - and lowest-overhead - way of doing this, is to restrict registration to users with valid email addresses from our domain. Drupal permits us to do this easily using the built-in access rules and user settings modules.

At
administration > user management > access rules
deny email %@%.% (i.e., deny all email addresses, except those overruled by the rules below; % is the wildcard for any number of characters)
allow email %@institutionsdomain

At
administration > user management > user settings,
be sure to check “Require e-mail verification when a visitor creates an account” -
so that outsiders cannot register with a fictitious address based on the institution’s domain.

Note that if we wished to open registration to students/faculty of allied schools, we could add additional access rules,
allow email %@institution#2sdomain
allow email %@institution#3sdomain
&c.

It might be nice to add some text to the user registration form, to inform registrants of the need to use the correct email address.  The text below the email entry field on the user registration page is in the file user.module, in /modules/user/, at line 1332.  I changed the first sentence of this text to:

Your valid NCNM-issued e-mail address (addresses on other domains will be rejected by the system).

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 8:52 pm and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.