to insert all personal information first as name, surname, city, email, password, etc… and sending a link confirmation on that email provided?
Not to register unverified users at all.: i.e. is it better to fill only one field as email, and then send a verification link on that email, that brings the user to fill the entire form registration?
The fact is that I want to avoid to collect unconfirmed users in the database!
I think it’s more a question of what the user prefers? From a database point of view IMO there’s no difference because you’d have to store the email and verification code anyway? If you don’t want to have unconfirmed accounts filling up the database, just do a periodic clean up?
Why not have a signups table with the information in? If they confirm the account then move the information to the relevant table(s), deleting the entry in the signup table. Have a cron job that runs once a day that deletes any signup where 30 days have elapsed between the current time and when they signed up, which aren’t confirmed
As a user, I’d find it quite frustrating to enter my e-mail, be directed to a verification link, and then find I haven’t actually completed the registration process. I’d rather do it all in one go and then verify it.
Discourse (the forum software here) automatically purges unverified accounts after 7 days.
Effectively, you make me think better, if I’m right we have:
in the point 2. there are 3 passages as:
i) fill email field;
ii) open verification link;
iii) fill signup form, and then completed;
in the point 1. there are 2 passages as:
i) fill signup form with email field
ii) open verfication link, and then completed
yes, what I have thought about. But I have thought to do every time a new user complete a registration opening a verification link.
By the way, I use PHP and MySQL I think that with an Event scheduler I can do that every 30 days… I never used schedulers however.
I would agree with @TechnoBear it’s better for the user to cut down the number of steps they must take. No one likes to have to jump through too many hoops, then be asked to jump through more.
I’m not familiar with “event schedulers” but it sounds similar to cron jobs which @SpacePhoenix mentions. You can usually set them up easily from your Cpanel. What it does is run a script you choose, PHP or whatever, at any set interval you choose. It can be every minute, hour, day, month, year or any time scale you want.
I’m not sure you would need a separate table, just a boolean field for “verification”. Then run a script, every day may be suitable, that selects and deletes any entry where verification is false and the timestamp is more than # days ago.