For today’s quick tip or reminder, we are looking at Joomla’s Users component. Specifically, the user activation.
Joomla allows you to choose between automatic activation, an activation on the user end or activation that requires administrator approval.
While the first two options are easy if you don’t want to get involved, this could lead to frustrations as you’re overrun by spammers who hammer your site(s) and access “restricted” areas for your site. E.G a user that can activate itself could easily start to spam the living bejeezus out of your forums or comment compoonents (if you have those installed).
That’s why the activation by admins is a good option if you want more control. However, when you enable this option you might run into an additional hurdle. By default the people that do the approving don’t get a notification. Joomla doesn’t have a module that says “Hey, guys, these people signed up. Can you look into that, please?”
That’s where the System Mails come into play. You will want to enable the “Receive System Messages” option on accounts of the users that you expect to activate the users. Don’t forget to save after you enable the option!