Ideas

Prompt to Confirm Email Address on Public-Facing Blocks

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Prompt to Confirm Email Address on Public-Facing Blocks

Core

We might be unique in this regard, but I doubt it. We are seeing a constant (now magnified since people are interacting with us more online) issue where people enter their email address wrong, causing all sorts of data integrity issues.

The core issue is that people often do not enter their email address correctly (especially on mobile) and while mis-spelling a name or phone might not be ideal, misspelling an *email* address means we cannot contact them at all (especially if we're not getting a phone number, too). For years the industry standard to work around this has been to solicit the email address TWICE, and only let the form submit if they match. This gives the user a chance to fix a mistake they didn't realize they made.

Where this causes major problems for us today:

  • Creating a new account: User uses /NewAccount page to register for the website. Rock sends a system email to them. If they didn't give us a valid email, they don't receive that email... and we're now stuck with an email that is disabled and have no way to contact them.

  • Registering for an Event: User enters their email address, and depending on the registration settings, this *may* change their email address in Rock to the one provided. So now someone just replaced their working email with a bad one, just by registering for an event.

  • Using the Group Register blocks: Users either aren't matching to themselves (because email doesn't match their existing record) or they end up creating a new record with bad email that must be discovered and merged.

  • Workflow User Forms: Same issues as above. Users don't get matched, don't get emails they just signed up for, don't get automated replies, etc.

  • My Account block (when editing)

  • And I'm sure there's many places I missed

To summarize: Rock should be asking the user to verify their email wherever it asks for them to enter it.

EDIT: After thinking about this a bit more, it seems like in addition to fixing up the obvious blocks that solicit email address, we would also need a new attribute type... something like "email with validation" or similar that automatically presents two email fields and will pop an error if they don't match. That would let it be used in Workflow forms and such that we create ourselves.

Photo of Jim MichaelSubmitted by Jim Michael, The Crossing - Chesterfield  ·   ·  Core
Photo of Jon EdmistonJon Edmiston, Spark!  · 

Our plan for this would be to add additional settings to the email field type and attribute "Enable Email Confirmation". We would add block settings on many of the pages that are public facing that allow a person to enter / edit their email addresses.

We believe that this feature should be optional as while many want feature some may feel like it's not the best UX. The best solution is to allow for choice on implementation.

Planned Version
Ministry Strength 2 / 5
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