Setting up the suggestions community

[me_and]

In case you ever want to do anything relating to the Make a suggestion page on a Dreamhack, I've recently gone through the process and written it up.

There are a few bits that are decidedly more hacky than I'd like, so it's definitely a thing that would benefit from others looking it over and making improvements, but it'll hopefully save other folk needing to go Perl diving for the details.

Comments

[denise]

Quick as I run out the door

* It's the dw-suggestions comm that has to be paid, not the user posting the suggestion! (Trufax: the reason free users can post polls in paid comms is to make this work.)

* There's no way to mark an account's email address as validated from the console -- you do have to run the worker to send out the email. (Or, I think there's a way to query the db for the validation link and just visit that link directly, but I'm not sure how to do it.)

[me_and]

Useful stuff, thank you! I'll poke kaberett to update the article.

I think sgsabbage said he'd found the bit of the database you can edit directly to just mark an email address as validated, although I'm not sure of the details, and it may be no easier than just finding the link and visiting it.

[kaberett]

... azurelunatic got to it before I did, which led to me being very briefly very confused about why it was already correct.

[sgsabbage]

Yup! For anyone who needs to do so, it can be done directly in the DB with:

UPDATE user SET status='A' WHERE userid=[user's id]

Or just ignore the WHERE statement and authenticate all of your users at once.

The valid statuses that I've been able to find are:
N - Not authenticated (default)
T - Transitioning (i.e. the user has previously been authenticated but has changed their email address and so needs to re-authenticate)
A - Authenticated

It'd probably be useful to put this in the wiki somewhere, maybe http://wiki.dreamwidth.net/wiki/index.php/Database_Table:_user, but I am unsure of the format, or if this is the appropriate place?