03 March 2017, 6:48

Hello!

I would like to configure an institution so that an already authenticated user could register automatically, without any admin or staff intervention.

I read the documentation http://manual.mahara.org/en/16.10/administration/institutions.html#add-an-institution, where I understood that I had simply to set the Registration allowed parameter to Yes and the Confirm registration to No.

I tried it. Once this is configured, an authenticated user can then click on the button to ask to become member of the institution, but it still needs the hand of an admin to confirm and finalize the membership.

On the other hand, once the user is member of the institution, he can ask to be retired; this process is achieved automatically and immediatly.

I am surprised, but I may not understand well.

Let me explain a little more about my overall setup, to clarify the context for which I am asking about this functionnality.

We have a main Mahara institution, which corresponds to the entire university, configured with the SAML authentication plugin. Every valid user that authenticate to our Mahara is automatically member of this main institution. (We use the member value of the eduPersonAffiliation attribute.)

As we are linked with a single Moodle instance, we figured out that this was good to do so.

But now, we would like to create some new little sub-institutions, so that members of those could benefit of the automatical copy of the sub-institution basics pages on first login. Differents schools and faculties will want their students to have particular basics pages.

In this synopsis, I call those "sub-institutions" as everyone will still member of the main institution, but each user can ask to become member of one (or more) other institutions.

We have a thousands of students; I can't imagine that someone will have to manually accept each membership demand...

To resume : 

1. I wonder if the Confirm Registration option behavior that I am facing is the expected behavior, and
2. I'd be please to know if there is a better path to achieve my goal.

Best regards,

Stéphanie

03 March 2017, 10:24

Hello Stéphanie,

Thank you for explaining your setup. There is no bug in Mahara. When an existing user wants to join an institution, she only requests membership. An admin will still need to approve that user.

The "Confirm registration" option is only for people who sign up to the site. If you set it to "No", a person can sign up for an account and request membership in an institution, but if the institution admin doesn't want to have him in her institution, the user account is still created, just in "No institution". We added the "Confirm registration" functionality to give sites more control and prevent spammers from signing up on more controlled sites. ;-)

That functionality has nothing to do with the internal institution membership request.

If you institution admins know who should be in their "sub-institution", they can always add them as members directly or they can approve them in bulk. Or you can change the behavior for your site via the code.

Cheers

Kristina

03 March 2017, 11:09

Thanks again, Kristina!

I first misunderstood the doc, because I read it having something else in mind. It's now clear.

All the best,

Stéphanie