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Activation emails

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Activation emails

#11

Post by nilobject »

ivankirigin wrote: post #10
mixmax wrote: post #3

Look at it from a business perspective: What do you gain from having an e-mail: - usually nothing, unless you send your users spam. What do you lose from having an e-mail: - around 10% of your potential customers. (the number probably varies wildly from site to site) - People who lose their password can't get into their account, unless they choose to provide an optional e-mail adress. To me that is a pretty clear cho…

Confirmation emails might be useless, but notifications of new features are not spam.

I generally get annoyed at sites that keep emailing me about new features. I always unsubscribe or opt-out at sign in, but some people don't offer that feature.

Re: Activation emails

#13

Post by mixmax »

ivankirigin wrote: post #10
mixmax wrote: post #3

Look at it from a business perspective: What do you gain from having an e-mail: - usually nothing, unless you send your users spam. What do you lose from having an e-mail: - around 10% of your potential customers. (the number probably varies wildly from site to site) - People who lose their password can't get into their account, unless they choose to provide an optional e-mail adress. To me that is a pretty clear cho…

Confirmation emails might be useless, but notifications of new features are not spam.

Yes you're right - this was just off the top of my head...

There might of course also be other valid reasons for wanting an e-mail adresse.

Re: Activation emails

#14

Post by kirubakaran »

nilobject wrote: post #11
ivankirigin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confirmation emails might be useless, but notifications of new features are not spam.

I generally get annoyed at sites that keep emailing me about new features. I always unsubscribe or opt-out at sign in, but some people don't offer that feature.

Yup. If they don't let up, I mark those emails as "spam" in my Gmail. I guess that counts against them.

They should have a "Don't mail me bro" checkbox. I don't always agree with their definition of "spam".

Re: Activation emails

#15

Post by noodle »

activation emails are trivial nowadays. too many bots beat the system. it used to add a level of security, but it doesn't anymore.

and you may be able to say the same for CAPICHAs later once someone devises a way to break them consistently.

Re: Activation emails

#16

Post by parker »

We've used a hard activation process previously, and only around 40% - 50% of people who signed up actually activated. Think about that ... over half of our users who spent the time getting to know the product enough to sign up didn't even get to use the site properly.

Now that I think about it, I think it's crazy... and I'm not using any activation on my new site. If they got their email wrong during sign-up (an occurence a lot more rare than 50%), they can just change it or sign up again.

Re: Activation emails

#17

Post by wanorris »

jdg wrote: post #8

I've moved to using soft email confirmation, meaning that it doesn't prevent the user from doing anything, it just removes a message on their dashboard or whatever reminding them to confirm their email address. Context is everything, but 99% of the time soft confirmation or no confirmation at all is fine.

I'm curious: what does this buy you over not sending one at all?

Re: Activation emails

#18

Post by drm237 »

What about in the situation where you're actually contacting other users on behalf of the registered user (think event planning)? In those cases, shouldn't you at least try to verify that the user is who they say they are? What are the alternatives?

Re: Activation emails

#19

Post by e1ven »

wanorris wrote: post #17
jdg wrote: post #8

I've moved to using soft email confirmation, meaning that it doesn't prevent the user from doing anything, it just removes a message on their dashboard or whatever reminding them to confirm their email address. Context is everything, but 99% of the time soft confirmation or no confirmation at all is fine.

I'm curious: what does this buy you over not sending one at all?

I think that the idea of a soft confirmation is a very good one, and we'll be switching over to that for Chron X.

The biggest reason we want an email address at all is for password resets. We have a decently large list of customers, some paying, others playing for free.. But if you've invested months, weeks or years into the game, and you lose your password, we want to have a way to help.

Currently, if this happens, we go into the database and manually verify your billing address, time you signed up, recent activity and the like, but it's a very manual and potentially error-prone process. Giving them a way to reset it automatically would help quite a bit.

The second thing we use it for is notifications. Since Chron X is an interactive game, some users request to have us send them a note when it's their turn. We wouldn't want to start sending out turn notifications without a confirmation, to avoid having users inconvenience others. ("Yeah! Send all my turns to billg@microsoft.com, and my second email, sjobs@corp.apple.com")..

We've been debating this internally for a while, arguing between easier signup (no conf), and better security, and lower customer service time (conf).

Soft-conf is a good tradeoff for us.

Re: Activation emails

#20

Post by powerflex »

mixmax wrote: post #13
ivankirigin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confirmation emails might be useless, but notifications of new features are not spam.

Yes you're right - this was just off the top of my head... There might of course also be other valid reasons for wanting an e-mail adresse.

Yeah, for example uniquely identifying users.
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