Post in Verification Text

Jun 16 00:01 UTC

I did more than think about putting the password-setting text on the
Email Verification page, I tried it. However, it did not work very well:
it ended up being *more* confusing because it was *less* clear which
browser window you should use to complete the task of registering. While
you claim “some users will not find there way back to the tab that says,
"ah, you verified" set your password now,” I have seen no evidence to
suggest that the number of “lost” uses will be more than negligible. In
addition, we a few things in our favor
  * The user (should) be very motivated to join the group.
  * By the time the user has arrived at the Awaiting Verification page, he
    or she has already expended considerable effort, so it not very likely
    to just give up ☺
  * The Awaiting Verification page clearly shows a disabled Next button.
  * The title of the Awaiting Verification page is good, so the user is
    able to find it quickly.
  * The user may never see the Awaiting Verification page, as he or she
    could have verified while changing the profile.
  * Even if the user does not complete the registration, all that the user
    has not done is set a password. He or she will still get messages from
    the groups that were joined during registration. A password-reset will
    get the user on to the site again ☺

Verifying an email address is the most confusing part of the entire
registration process. Basically, registration will always be confusing
because there is parallelism in the system. Richard and I spent a long
time with lots of graph paper trying to think of ways around the
parallelism, but we could not. You can see the problem in Step 5 of the
*first* post I made about registration
  http://groupserver.org/r/post/1KOtevr6QTbZtnO4PBMuVu
You also see the problem in the state-transition diagram that I drew early
on
http://groupserver.org/r/file/705751-2007-09-26T030607Z/registration-state-transition.pdf

Thanks for the suggestion, Steve, but I think we will stick with the current
registration process ☺