Email activation, is it still relevant?

I'm guessing that one of the original ideas behind email activation in forum software was to prevent automated spam bots (along with email marketing of course but that's for a different post :wavespin

Now that spam bots can auto-click the links in these activation emails without any problems at all, is it really worth having them turned on any more, particularly with the improvements to captcha systems? Are they more of a hindrance to your new members?

I can tell you from my own experience that if an activation email takes longer than about 20 seconds to arrive then I just forget about the forum / website and move on to the next one unless it's something I'm particularly passionate about (or have paid for)

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has experimented with turning off email activation and whether you tracked any increase in completed registrations and spam bots.

Also, do any of you with large forums have any stats on the number of members who signed up but never bothered clicking the activation link? If so, I'd be eternally grateful if you wouldn't mind sharing those stats

The next question then would be, how often do you email your members and is it marketing information / advertising information that you email them? If not, does it really matter if the email address is valid? :wavespin:

I'd be interested to know from anyone that has turned email activation off, what sort of a difference did you notice in bounce email rates from before/after?

---------- Post added at 12:06 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:02 PM ----------

One additional thing, do many of you even read these newsletters that you get from forums?

I've been a member of Webhostingtalk.com since 2002 and for as long as I can remember, I've been getting their monthly newsletter. I am pretty certain that I've never read a single one of them, the same goes for most other forums that I'm a member of (although very few seem to send out newsletters on a regular basis).

Michael brings up a good point about password resets. The problem is, that even with email activation required, anyone can get a disposable email address in 5 seconds nowadays, eg - Mailinator - Let Them Eat Spam!

For you guys who have turned it off, what are you bounce rates like? I'd be interested to know how many do enter a fake email address, particularly if you put a "*required" on the signup form next to the email box

Aye, but that's a hell of a lot of work for what gain? All that just to ensure that members have an apparently valid email address so you can send them newsletters / etc that they probably won't even read? That's what I'm trying to avoid

I'm of the opinion that the opposite would happen. The longer the registration process is, the more chance there is of the member just giving up and moving on to the next site. If there is a delay in the email system somewhere and the activation email takes 5 minutes to arrive, I'll be long gone by then - I'm not going to sit there staring at my inbox for 5 minutes just to make a post on a forum.

It's not such a problem for us techies who have their email open 24/7 and are fluent in using it but what about for the average user? My sister opens her email once every 3 days so if she joined a forum, she'd fill out the reg form (can't touch type so it would take a while), then it would flash up a message about an email so she'd probably close the site to load her hotmail (still has no idea what tabs are ), login to her hotmail, wade through all the spam and other messages that have accumulated over the past 3 days to find the activation email and chances are, she'll get distracted by another email and read that first, which will then lead to another, and before you know it she's forgotten all about your forum and it's activation email.

You might think that my sister is just a bit slow when it comes to computers but she's really not, from what I've seen of my non-techie friends, this is how your average 25+ year old non-techie works

I'd love to see forum software developers re-think some of their user interface, the signup form being a major one - I have to enter my email address TWICE, then click a link to confirm it as well, really? Is that not a touch much just to confirm an email address? At least get rid of the second email entry box, it's in plain text, we can read what we type

Anyway, before I get into a real rant about the state of web application user interfaces I'll just hush up :X3: I think that most of you know how I feel about user interfaces from my Signup form thread and my Twitter rants

I will say though that on the new communities I'm building, signup forms are drastically simplified and streamlined, options to login with social networking (twitter / facebook / etc) will be prominently displayed on the homepage and sign-in / sign-up pages and I'll be working on some other aspects of the UI to streamline it a bit. Here's hoping it actually makes a difference to conversions

Oh, and I've decided, email activation is going as well. Instead I'll be auto-sending a welcome email to each new member and monitoring bounce replies. Those who bounce will just get an automated PM asking them to verify their email address. If they still don't update it to a working one then so be it. I'm not that interested in having a mailing list of verified email addresses as I don't believe they have the value that they used to. Nowadays I would prefer to do my direct marketing on a facebook page with a ton of followers rather than direct email which would likely get caught up in fancy spam filters anyway

Keep an eye on BBCustom when it launches, all of these mods will be released on there